An essay in refutation of atheism.

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AN ESSAY

REFUTATION OF ATHEISM

0. A. BROWNSON.

EDITED BY

HENRY F. BHOWN80N

DETROIT:

THORNDIKE NOURSE.
1883.

THE r^SW YC

hf22So^

ASTOR. LENOX AND

TILDEN FOUNDATIONS

R 1931 i-

Entered according to ih^ Act of Contrrass, in the year 18*), by

HENRY F. BROWXSON.

In the Office of the Librarian of Congress at Washington, D. C.

CONTENTS.

iNTKOnUCTTON I

TDRISM in l^OSSESSION 4

Th>: Atiikis'l' Cannot Tukn the pKEsuMrTiON 9

No PuHKi.Y Cosine Science 13

TlTEOLOOIANS AND THE SCIENTISTS 84

iHCoxciiUsivR Proofs 33

Analysis ok Thought 40

Analysis of the Object 46

Analysis of the Ideal 5()

Analysis op the RELATIo^ — 62

The Fact of Creation 07

Existences 7fi

God as Final Cause SI

Obligation of Worship S8

Traditiox 94

PREFACE

iN Essii II immm of imEisii,

It is not without some misgiving that I present the following essay to
the public; not, indeed, because I have any lack of confidence in the
soundness of its principles, or the combined analytical and synthetic pro-
cesses by which I attempt to demonstrate the existence of God, the fact
of creation, providence, the moral law, and the ground of man's moral
obligation to worship God ; but from a consciousness of my inability to
do justice to the great thesis I have undertaken to defend, and my dis-
trust of the disposition of the public to receive and read with patience
what is most likely to be treated as a metaphysical disquisition, and
therefore as worthless. Nobody now reads metaphysical works, or any
works that pertain to the higher philosophy, and especially such as
attempt to vindicate theology as the science of sciences.

All I can say is, that my essay is not metaphysical in the ordinary
acceptation of the term, does not attempt to construct a science of
abstractions, which are null, and deals only with concretes, with reali-
ties. Some of the problems, and the analyses by which I attempt to
solve them, may be regarded as abstruse, dithcult, and foreign from the
ordinary current of thought, as all such discussions must necessarily be;
but I have done my best to make my statements and reasonings clear and
distinct, plain and intelligible to men of ordinary understanding and
intellectual culture.

The greatest difficulty the reader will find arises from the fact that I
liave not followed the more common methods of proving ihe existence of
God, and that while I have broached no new system of philosophy,
I have adopted an unfamiliar method of demonstration, though in my
judgment rendered necessary by the logic of the case. I follow neither the
ontological method, nor the psychological method, and adopt neither the
argument a priori, nor the argument a posterioH, and while I maintain
that the principles of all the real and the knowable are intuitively given
I deny that we know that being or God is by intuition.

I have borrowed from Plato and Aristotle, St. Augustine and St.
Thomas, from Cousin and Gioberti, heathen and Christian, orthodo.x and
heterodox what I found to my purpose, but I follow no one any further
than he follows what I hold to be demonstrable or undeniable truth. I
have freely criticized and rejected the teachings of eminent authors, for
some of whom I have a profound reverence, but I think my criticisms
carry their own justification with them. I have adopted the Ideal formula.
Ens creai existentias, asserted by Gioberti; but not till I have by my own
analysis of thought, the objective element of thought, and the ideal ele-
ment of the object, been forced to accept it; and whether I explain and
apply it or not in his sense, I certainly take it in none of the senses that,
to my knowledge, have been objected to by his critics. I am not a fol-
lower of Gioberti; he is not my master; but I cannot reject a truth
because he has defended it; and to refuse to name him, and give him
credit where credit is honestly his due, because he is in bad odor with a
portion of the public, would be an act of meanness and cowardice of
which I trust I am incapable.

My essay ought to be acceptable to all who profess to be Christians.
What my religion is all the world knows that knows me at all. I am an
uncompromising Catholic, and on all proper occasions I glory in avow-
ing my adherence to the See of Rome, and in defending the Catholic
faith, and the Roman Pontiff now gloriously reigning, the Vicar of
Christ, and Supreme Head and infallible teacher of the Universal Church.
Such being the fact, there would be a waul of good l;iste as well as

manliness in seeking to disguise or to conceal it. But in this work I
have had no occasion to discuss any question on which there are any
differences among those who profess to be Christians, and I have only
defended, not the faith, but the preamble to faith, as St. Thomas calls it,
against the common enemy of God and man.

I have embodied in this comparatively brief essay the results of my
reading and reflections during a long life on the grounds of science,
religion, and ethics; they may not be worth much, but I give them to
the public for what they are worth They do not solve all the questions
that the ingenious and the subtile critic may raise, and fairly respond to
all the objections that sophists and cavillers may adduce; but I think the
work indicates a method which will be useful to many minds, and, if
it converts no atheist, will at least tend to confirm Christians in the
fundamental article of their faith, and to put them on their guard against
the seductions of a satanic philosophy and a false, but arrogant science
to which they are everywhere exposed. I have written to save the cause
of truth and sound philosophy, and, in all humility, I submit what I
have written to the protection of Ilim whose honor and glory I have
wished to serve, and to the infallible judgment of his Vicar on earth.

O. A. BROWNSON.
Elizabeth, N. J., March, 1873.

ESSAY IN REFUTATION OF ATHEISM.

(From Brovrason's Quarterly Review foi- 1873-4.]

I. INTRODUCTION.

TnE a^e of heresy is virtually past. Heresy, in its pro-
gressive developments, has successively arraigned and
rejected every article in the creed, from " Patremomnlpo-
tentem" down to " Vitara seternam." Following its essential
nature, that of arbitrary choice among revealed mysteries
and dogmas, of what it will rejector retain, it has eliminated
one after another, till it has nothing distinctively Christian
remaining, or to distinguish it from pure, unmitigated
rationalism and downright naturalism. It retains with the
men and women of the advanced, or movement party,
hardly a dim and fading reminiscence of the supernatural,
and may be said to have exhausted itself, and gone so far
that it can go no further.

No new heresy is possible. The pressing, the living con-
troversy of the day is not between orthodoxy and heterodoxy,
which virtually ended with Bossuet's Ilistoire des Varia-
tions du Protestant! s me, and the issue is now between
Christianity and infidelity, faith and unbelief, religion and
no religion, the worsliip of God the Creator, or the idolatry
of man and nature — in a word between tiieism and atheism ;
for pantheism, so fearfully pi-evalent in modern philosophy,
is oidy a form of atheism, and in substance differs not from
what the fool says in Jus heart, Non-j^st Deus. Not all
on either side, however, have as yet become aware that this
is the real issue, or that the old controversy between the
orthodox and the heterodox, or the church and the sects, is
not still a living controversy ; but all on either side who
have looked beneath the surface, and marked the tendencies
of modern thought and of modern tlieories widelj' received,
in their principles if not in their developments, are well
aware tliat the exact question at issue is no longer the church,
but back of it in the domain of science and philosophy, and
is simply, God or no God ?

The scientific theories in vogue are all atheistic, or have
at least an atheistic tendency ; for they all seek to explaia
Vol. n.— 1

2 KEFUTATION OF ATHEISM

man and the universe, or the cosmos, witlj,ont the recognition
of God as its first or its final cause. Even the philosopliical
systems that professedly combat atheism and materialism,
fail to recognize the fact of creation from nothing, assume
the pi'oduction of the cosmos by way of emanation, forma-
tion, or evolution, which is only a form of atheism. Even
phih)Sophical theories which profess to demonstrate the
existence of God, bind him fast or completely hedge him
in by what they call " the laws of nature," deny him per-
sonality or tlie last complement of rational nature, and take
from liim his liberty or freedom of action, whicli is really
to deny him, or, what is the same thing, to absorb him in
the cosmos.

The ethical theories of our moral philosophers have
equally an atheistical tendency. They all seek a basis for
virtue' without the recognition of God, the creative act, or
the divine will Some place the ethical principle in self-
interest, some in utility, some in instinct, some in what they
call a moral sense, amoral sentiment, or Iti a subjective idea;
others, in acting according to truth ; others, in acting accord-
ing to the fitness of things, or in reference to universal
order. Popular literature, written or inspii'ed in no small
part by women, places it in what it calls love, and in doing
what love dictates. The love, however, is instinctive, car-
ries its own reason aiid justification in itself, refuses to be
morally bound, and shrinks from the very thought of duty
or ol)ligation — a love that moves and operates as one of the
great elemental forces of nature, as attraction, gravitation,
the wind, the storm, or the lightning. The Christian doc-
trine that nudces virtue consist in voluntary obedience to the
law of God as our sovereign, our final cause, and finds the
basis of moral obligation in our relation to God as his creat-
ures, created for him as their last end, is hardly entertained
by any class of modern ethical philosophers, even when they
profess to \)e Christians.

In politics, the same tendency to eliminate God from
society and the state is unmisftdcable. The statesmen and
political jihilosophers who base their politics on principles
derived fi'om theology are exceptions to the rule, and are
regarded as " behind the age." Political atlieism, or the
assumption that the secular order is independent of the spir-
itual, and can and shoidd exist and act without regard to it,
is the popular dot-trine throughout Europe and America,
alike with monarchists and republicans, and is at the hot-

INTKODUCTION. 3

torn of all the revolntionaiy movements of the last century
and the present. Nothino; can be said that will be received
with more general repugnance by the men of the age than
the assertion of the supremacy of the spiritual order, or the
denial that the secular is independent, — supreme.

If we glance at the various projects of reform, moral,
political, or social, which are put forth from day to day in
such numbers and with so much confidence, we shall see
that they are all pervaded by one and the same atheistic
thought. We see it in the late Hobert Owen's scheme of
parallelograms, which avowedly assunied that the race had
hitherto been afflicted by a trinity of evils of which it is
necessary to get rid, namely, property, marriage, and reli-
gion ; we see it it in the phalanstery of Charles Fourier,
based on passional harmony, or rather on passional indul-
gence ; we see it also in the International Association of
working men, who would seem to be moved by a personal
hatred of God ; finally, we see it in the mystic republic of
the late Mazzini, \vho though he accepts, in name, God and
religion, yet makes the people God, and popular instincts
religion. The Saint-Simonians, with their Nouveau -Chris-
tianisme^ are decidedly pantheists, and the Comtists recog-
nize and worship no God but the grand collective being,
humanity ; Proudhon declared that we must deny God, or
not be able to assert liberty.

This rapid sketch is sufiicicnt to bear out the statement
that the living controversy of the day is not between ortho-
dox and heterodox Christians, but between Christianity and
atheism, or, what is the same thing, Christianity and pan-
theism. The battle is not even for supernatural revelation,
but for God, the Creator and End of man and the universe,
for natural reason and natural society, for the very principle
of intellectual, moral, and social ^ife. It is all veiy well
for those excellent people who never look beyond their own
convictions or ])rejudices to tell us that atheism is absurd,
and that we need not trouble ourselvos about it, for no man
in his senses is, or can be, an atheist. But let no one lay
this "flattering unction to his soul." Facts, too painfully
certain to be disputed, and too numerous to be unheeded by
any one who attends at all to what is going on under his
very eyes, prove the contrary. The fools are not all dead,
and a new ci'op is born every year.

The Internationals are avowed atheists, and they boast
that their association, which is but of yesterday, has already

4 KEFUTATION OF ATHEISM.

(1871) two millions of men in France enrolled in its ranks,
and four millions in the rest of Europe. Is this nothing ?
What (heir principles are, and wliat their conduct may be
expected to be, the murders and incendiarisms of the Pari*
Commune, which their chiefs approv^ed, liave sufficiently
tanght us. But, under the guise of science and free thought,
men of the higliest intellectual, literary, and social standing,
like Ralph AValdo Emerson and his disciples, like Charles
Darwin, Sir John Lubbock, Professors Huxley and Tjndall,
Herbert Spencer, Emile Littre, and the Positivists or wor-
shippers of humanitj'. to say nothing of the Hegelians of
Germany and the majoritj" of the medical profession, are
daily and hourly propagating atheism, open or disguised, in.
our higher literary and cultivated classes. The ablest and
most approved organs of public opinion in Great Britain
and the United States, France and Germany, either defend
atheistic science, or treat its advocates with great respect
and tenderness, as if the questions they raise were purely
speculative, and without any practical bearing on the great
and vital interests of man and society. There may be, and
we trust there is, much faith, much true piety left in Chris-
tendom ; but public opinion, we may say the official opinion,
— the opinion that linds expression in nearly all modern,
governments and legislation, — is antichi-istian, and between
Christianity and atheism there is no middle ground, no legit-
imate halting place.

It certainly, then, is not a work uncalled for, to subject
the atheistic and false theistic theories of the day to a brief
but rigid examination. The proi)lem we have to solve is
the gravest problem that can occupy the human intellect or
the human heart, the individual or society. It is, whether
there is a God who has created the world from nothing, who
is our first cause and our last cause, who has made us for
himself as our supreme good, who sustains and governs u&
by his providence, and has the right to our obedience and
worship; or whether we are in the world, coming we know
not whence, and going we know not whither, without any
rule of life or purpose in our existence.

n. — THEISM EST POSSESSION.

An atheist is one who is not a theist. Atheists may be
divided into two classes, positive and negative. Positive
atheists are those who deny positively the existence of God,

ATHEISM m I'oStiESSION. ,)

and profess to be able to prove that God is not ; negative
atheists are those, who, if they do not deny positively that
God is, maintain that he is unknowable, that we have, and
can have no proof of his existence, no reason for asserting
it, for the hvpothesis of a God explains and accounts
for nothing. Of this latter class of atheists are the Comtists
and the Cosmists, or those who take Augnste Comte for their
master and those who swear by Herbert Spencer.

False theists or pantheists reject the name of atheists, and
jet are not essentially distinguishable from them. They are
divided into several classes : 1, the emanationists, or those
who hold that all things emanate, as the stream from the
fountain, from the one only being or substance which they
call God, and return at length to him and are reabsorbed in
him ; 2, the generationists, or those who hold that the one
only being or substance is in itself both male and female,
iind generates the world from itself ; 3, the formationists, or
those who, like Plato and Aristotle, hold that God produces
all tilings by giving form to a preexisting and eternal mat-'
ter, as an artificer constructs a liouse or a temple with mate-
rials furnished to his hand; 4, the ontologists, or Spinozists,
who assert that nothing is or exists, but being or substance,
with its attributes or modes ; 5, tlie psychologists or egoists,
or those who assert that nothing exists but the soul, the Ego,
a]id its productions, modes, or affections, as maintained by
Fichte.

There are various other shades of pantheism ; but all pan-
theists coalesce and agree in denying the creative act of
being producing all things from nothing, and all, except the
formationists, represented by Plato and Aristotle, agree in
maintaining that there is only one substance, and that the
cosmos emanates from it, is generated by it, or is its attri-
bute, mode, affection, or phenomenon. The characteristic
of pantheism is the denial of creation from nothing and the
creation of substantial existences or second causes, that is,
existences capable, when sustained by the tirst cause, of act-
ing from their own centre and producing clfects of their
own. Plato and Aristotle approach nearer to theism than
any other class of pantheists, and if tliey had admitted cre-
ation they would not be pantheists at all, but theists.

Omitting the philosophers of tiie Academy and the Lyceum,
all pantheists admit only one substance, which is the siih-
fitance or reality of the ctjsmus, on which all the cosmic
phenomena depend for their reality, and of which tlicy ;iro

6 REFUIWJ'IOX OF ATHEISM.

simply appearances or manifestations. Here pautlieisni and
atheism coincide, and are one and the same ; for whether
you call this one substance God, soul, or nature, makes not
the least difference in the world, since you assert nothing
above or distinp^uishable frojn.the cosmos. Pantheism may
be the more subtle form, but is nojie the less a form of athe-
ism, and pantheists are really only atheists ; for they assert
no God distinct from nature, above it, and its creator.

Pantheism is the earliest form of atheism, the first depart-
ure from theology, and is not regarded by those who accept
it as atheism at ail. It undoubtedly retains many theistical
conceptions around which the religious sentiments may linger
for a time ; 3'et it is no-theism and no-theism is atheism.
Pantheism, if one pleases, is inchoate atheism, the first step
in the descent from theism, as complete atheism is the last.
It is the germ of which atheism is the blossom or the ripe
fruit. Pantheism is a misconceptioii of the relation of cause
and effect, and the beginning of the corruption of the ideal ;
atheism is its total corruption and loss. It is implicit not
explicit atheism, as every heresy is implicitly though not
explicitly the total denial of Christianity, since Christianity
is an indivisible whole. In this sense, and in this sense only^
are pantheism and atheism distinguishable.

Pantheism in some of its forms underlies all the ancient
and modern heathen mythologies ; and nothing is more absurd
than to suppose that these mythologies were primitive, and
that Christianity has been gradually developed from them.
Men could not deny God before his existence had been
asserted, nor could they identify him with the substance or
reality manifested in the cosmic phenomena if they had no
notion of his existence. Pantheism and atheism presuppose
theism ; for the denial cannot precede tlie aflirmation, and
either is unintelligible without it, as Protestantism presup-
poses and is unintelligible without the church in commun-
ion with the See of Rome against which it protests. The
assertion of the papal supremacy necessarily preceded its
denial. Dr. Draper, Sir John Lubbock, as well as a host of
others, maintain that the more perfect forms of religion
have been developed from the less perfect, as Professor
Huxley maintains that life is developed from protoplasm,
and protoplasm from proteine, and Charles Darwin that the
higher species of animals have been developed from the
lower, man from the ape or some one of the monkey tribe,
by the gradual operation for ages of what he calls " natural
selection."

THEISM EST POSSESSION. T

It has almost passed into an axiom that the luiman race
began, as to religion, in fetichism, and passed progressively
through the various forms and stages of polytheism up to the
sublime monotheism of the Jews and Christians; yet the
only authority for it is that it chimes in with the general
theory of progress lield by a class of antichristian theorists
and socialists, but which has itself no basis in science, his-
tory. Or philosophy. So far as history goes, the monotheism
of the Jews and Christians is older than polytheism, older
than fetichism, and in fact, as held by the patriarchs, was
the primitive religion of mankind. There is no earlier his-
torical record extant than Genesis^ and in that we find the
recognition and worship of one only God, Creator of the
heavens and the earth, as well established as subsequently
with the Jews and Christians. The oldest of the Vedas are
the least corrupt and superstitious of the sacred books of the
Hindoos, but the theology even of the oldest and purest is
decidedly pantheistic, which as we have said, presupposes
theism, and never could have preceded the theistical theol-
ogy. Pantheism may be developed by way of corruption
from theism, but theism can never be developed in any sense
from pantheism.

All the Gentile religions or superstitions, if carefully
examined and scientifically analyzed, are seen to have
their type in the patriarchal religion, — the type, be it under-
stood, from which they have receded, but not the ideal
which they are approaching and struggling to realize. They
all have their ideal in the past, and each points to a perfec-
tion once possessed, but now lost. Over them all hovers
the memory of a departed glory. The genii, devs, or divi,
the good and the bad demons of the heathen mythologies,
are evidently travesties of the Biblical doctrine of good and
bad angels. The doctrine of the fall, of expiation and repa-
ration by the sutf ering and death of a God or Divine Person,
which meets us under various forms in c\ll the Indo-Ger- '
manic or Aryan mythologies, and indeed in all the known
mythologies of the world, are evidently derived from the
teachings or the patriarchal or primitive religion of the
race, — not the Christian doctrine of original sin, redemp-
tion, and reparation by the passion and death of Our Lord,
from them. The heathen doctrines on all these points are
mingled with too many silly fables, too many superstitious
details and revolting and indecent incidents, to have been
primitive, and clearly prove that they are a primitive doc-

8 liEKLTATlON ()]'■ A'l'IlKIsM.

trine corrupted. The purest and simplest forms are always
the earliest.

We see, also, in all these heathen mythologjies, traces or
reminiscences of an original belief in the unity of God.
Above all the Dii Majores an I the Dii Minores there hovers,
so to speak, dimly and indistinctly it may be, one supreme
and ever-living: God, to whom Saturn, Jupiter, Juno, Venus,
Yulcan, Mars, Dis, and all the other g'ods and goddesses to
whom temples were erected and sacrifices were offered, were
inferior and subject. It is true the heathen regarded him
as inaccessible and inexorable; paid him no distinctive wor-
ship, and denominated him Fate or Destiny ; yet it is clear
that in the to ly of the Alexandrians, the Eternity of the
Persians, above both Ormuzd and Ahriman, the heathen
retained at least an obscure and fading reminiscence of the
unity and supremacy of the one God of tradition. They
knew him, but they did not, when they knew him, worship
him as God, but gave his glory unto creatures or empty
idols.

We denj^, then, that fetichism or any otlier form of
heathenism is or can be the primitive or earliest religion of
mankind. The primitive or earliest known religion of man-
kind was a purely theistical religion. Monotheism is, his-
torically as well as logically, older than polytheism; the
worship of God preceded the worship of nature, the ele-
ments, the sun, moon, and stars of heaven, or the demons
swarming in the air. Christian faith is in substance older
than pantheism, as pantheism is older than undisguised
atheism. Christian theism is the oldest creed, as well as the
oldest philosophy of mankind, and has been from the first
and still is the creed of the living and progressive portion
of the human race.

Christianity claims, as every body knows, to be the prim-
itive and universal religion, and to be based on absolutely
catholic principles. Always and everywhere held, though
not held by all individuals, or even nations, free from all
admixture of error and superstition. Yet analyze all the
heathen religions, eliminate all their differences, as Mr.
Herbert Spencer proposes, take what is positive or affirm-
ative, permanent, universal, in them, as distinguished from
what in them is negative, limited, lo(.'al, varfable, or tran-
sitory, and you will have remaining the principles of Chris-
tiauitj' as found in the patriarchal religion, as held in the
Synagogue, and taught by the Cliurch of Christ. These

THKISM IN POSSESSION. y

pvmc\])\es are all absolutely catholic or universal, and hence
Christianity, in its essential principles at least, is really the
universal religion, and in possession as such. The presump-
tion, as say the lawyers, is then decidedly in favor of the
Christian and against the atheist.

Christianity, again, not only asserts God and his provi-
dence as its fundamental principle, but claims to be the law
of God, supernaturally revealed to man, or the revelation
which he has made of himself, of his providence, of his
will, and of what he exacts of his rational cre^itures. Then,
again, Cliristianity asserts, in principle, only the catholic or
universal belief of the race. The belief in God, in provi-
dence, natural power, and in supernatural intervention in
human affairs in some form, is universal. Even the atheist
shudders at a ghost story, and is surprised by sudden danger
into a prayer. Men and nations may in tlieir ignorance or
superstition misconceive and misrepresent tlie Divinity, but
they could not do so, if they had no belief that God is.
Prayer to God or the gods, which is universal, is full proof
of the universality of the belief in Divine Providence and
in supernatural intervention. Hence, again, the presump-
tion is in favor of Christian theism and against th^ atheist.

Of course, this universal belief, or this eonsensufi hominum,
is not adduced here as full proof of the truth of Christianity,
or of the catholic principles on which it rests; but it is
adduced as a presumptive proof of Christianity and against
atheism, while it undeniably throws the burden of proof on
the atheist, or whoever questions it. It is not enough for
the atheist to deny God, providence, and the supernatural;
be must sustain his denial by proofs strong enough, at least,
to turn the presumption against Ciu-istianity, before he can
oblige or compel the Christian to plead. Till then, " So I
and my fathers have always held," is all the reply he is
required to make to any one that would oust him.

ni. — THE ATHEIST CANNOT TURN THE PKESUMPTION

But can the atheist turn the presumption, and turn it
against the tlieist? It perhaps will be more difficult to do
it than he imagines. It is very easy to say that the universal
fact which the Christian adduces originated in ignorance,
which the progress of science has dissipated ; but this is not
enough : the atheist must prove that it has actually origi-
nated in men's ignorance, and not in their knowledge, and

10 KEFUTATION OF ATHEISM.

that the alleged progress of science, so far as it bears on this
question, is not itself an illusion; for he must bear in mind
that tlie burden of proof rests on him, since theism is in
possession and the presumption is against him. Is it certain
that Christians have less science than atheists? As far as
our observation goes, the atheist may have more of tlieory
and be richer in bold denials and in unsupported assertions,
but he has somewhat less of science than the Christian theo-
logian. The alleged progress of science, be it greater or
less, throws no light one way or another on the question ;
for it is confessedly confined to a region below that of reli-
gion, and does not rise above or extend beyond the cosmos.
. The latest and ablest representatives of the atheistical
science of the age are the Positivists, or followers of Auguste
Comte, and the Cosmists, or admirers of Herbert Spencer, and
neither of these pretend that their science has demonstrated or
can demonstrate that God is not. Mr. John Fiske, who last
year (1S70) was a Comtist, and who is this year (1871) a Cos-
mist says, in one of his lectures before Harvard College, very
distinctly, that they have not. He says, speaking of God
and religion: "We are now in a region where absolute
demonstration, in the scientific sense, is impossible. It is
beyond the power of science to prove that a personal God
either exists or does not existy This is express, and is not
affected by tlie interjection of the word personal^ for an
impersonal God is no God at all, but is simply nature or the
cosmos, and indistinguishable from it. The lecturer, after
admitting the inability of science to prove there is no God,
proceeds to criticise the arguments usually adduced to prove
that God is, and to show that they are all inconclusive.
Suppose him successful in this, which, by the way, he is not,
he proves nothing to the purpose. The insufficiency of the
argume .ts alleged to prove tliatGod is, does not entitle him
to conclude that God is not, and creates no presumption that
he is not. He cannot conckide from their insufficiency that
science is capable of overcoming the great fact the Christian
adduces, and which creates presumption against atheism.

It is, no doubt, true, that both the Comtists and Cosmists
deny that tlioy are atheists ; but they are evidently what we
have called negative atheists; for they do not assert that
God is, and maintain that thei'e is no evidence or proof of
his existence. If they do not positively denj' it, they cer-
tainly do not affirm it. They admit, indeed, an infinite
power. Force, or Reality, underlying the cosmic phenomena,

THE ATHEIST CANNOT TURN THE PRESUMPTION. 11

and of which the phenomena are manifestations ; but this
does not relieve them of atheism, for it is not independent
of the cosmos or distinguishable from it. It is simply the
cosmos itself — the substance or reality — that appears in the
cosmic phenomena. It, then, is not God, and they do not
call it God, and avowedly reject what they call the " theist-
ical hypothesis."

Yet both sects agree in this, that they have no science
that disproves the " theistical hypothesis," or that does or
can prove the falsity of the great catholic principles asserted
in the universal beliefs of the race. Mr. Fiske, in his lec-
ture, says: "We cannot therefore expect to obtain a result
which, like a mathematical theorem, shall stand firm through
mere weight of logic, or which, like a theorem in physics, can
be subjected to a crucial test. We can only examine the argu-
ments on which the theistic hypothesis is founded, and
inquire whether they are of such a character as to be con-
vincing and satisfactory If it turns out that these

arguments are not .... satisfactory, it will follow that, as
the cosmic philosophy becomes more and more widely
understood and accepted, the theistical hypothesis Avill gen-
erally fall into discredit, not because it will have been dis-
proved bat because there will be no sufticient warrant for
maintaining it." This is a full and frank confession that
science does not and cannot disprove Christian theism, and
that the hope of the Cosmists to get it superseded by the
cosmic philosophy, does not rest on disproving it, but in per-
suading men that there "is no sufficient warrant for main-
taining it." But, if science cannot disprove theism, the
presumption remains good against atheism, and the Christian
theist is not required to produce his title deeds or proofs.
Till then, the argument from prescription or possession is
all the warrant he needs.

But the confession that science cannot prove that God is
not, is the confession that the atheist has no scientific truth
to oppose Christian theism, but only a theory, an opinion,
a "mental habit," without any scientific support. In the
passage last quoted from Mr. Fiske we have marked an
omission. The part of the sentence omitted is, " none who
rigidly adhere to the doctrine of evolution, who assert the
relativity of all knowledge, and who refuse to reason on the
subjective method." There can be no doubt that the doc-
trine of evolution and the relativity of all knowledge is
incompatible, as Mr, Fiske and his master, Herbert Spencer,

12 REFUTATION OF ATHEISM.

maintain, with Christian theism, or the assertioii that God
is. But as science cannot prove tliat God is not, it follows
that the doctrine of evolution and the relativity of all knowl-
edge, which the Cosinists oppose to the existence of God, is
not and cannot be scientifically proved, and is simply a theory
or hypothesis, not science, and connts for nothing- in the
aro-umoiiL In confessing their inability to deinonstrate
what the fool says in hislieart, Non est Deus, God is not,^
they confess their inability to demonstrate their doctrine of
evolution, -and the relativity of all knowdedge. They also
thus confess that they have no science to oppose theism, and
they expect it to perish, in the words of Mr. Fiske, " as
other doctrines have perished, through lack of the mental
predisposition to accept it." This should dispose of the
objection to Christian theism drawn from pretended science,
and it leaves the presumption still against atheism, as we
have found it.

It is hardly necessary to remark tliat the presumption in
favor of theism cannot be overcome, and the burden of proof
thrown on the tlieist by any alleged theory or liypothesis which
is not itself demonstrated or jiroved. The atheist must
prove that his theory or hypothesis is scientifically true,
which of course the cosmic philosophers, who assert the
theory of evolution and of the relativity of all knowledge,
cannot do. If all knowledge is relative, there is then no
absolute knowledge ; if no absolute knowledge, the Cosmists
can neither absolutely know nor prove that all knowledge is
relative. The proof of the tlieory of the relativity of all
knowledge would consequently be its refutation ; for then all
knowledge would not be relative, to wit, the knowledge that
all knowledge is relative. The theory is then self-contradic-
tory, or an unprovable and an uncertain opinion ; and an
uncertain opinion is insufficient to oust theism from its
immemorial possession. The atheist must allege against it
positive truth, or facts susceptible of being positively proved,
or gain no standing in court.

According to the Cosmists, there is no absolute science, and
acience itself is a variable and uncertain thing. Mr. Fiske
tells us that in ISTO he was a Conitist or Positivist, and
defended, in his course of lectures of that year, the '"Fhilo-
«ophie Positive ;" but in this year (lS7i) he holds and
defends the cosmic philosophy, which he says " differs from
it almost fundamentally." The Conitean philosophy absorbs
the cosmos in man and society; the cosmic philosophy

THE ATHEIST CANNOT TURN THE PRESUMPTION. IS

includes man and society in tlie cosmos, as it does minerals,
vegetables, animals, apes and tadpoles, and subjects them all
alike to one and the same universal law of evolution. This,
onr cosmic or Speucerian philosopher assures us, is science
to-day. But who can say "what it will be fifty years hence,
or wliat modifications of it the unremitted investigations of
scientific men into the cosmic phenomena and their laws will
necessitate.'' There is and can be no real, invariable, and
permanent science, j'et the cosmic philosophers see no absurd-
ity in asking the race to give up its universal beliefs on the
authorit}^ of their present theory, and nothing wrong in try-
ing to spread their ever-shifting, evei'-varying science and
make it supersede in men's minds tlie Christian principles of
God, creation, and providence, although they confess that it
may turn out on inquiry to be false.

^ There is no doubt that, if the cosmic philosophers could
get their pretended science generally accepted, they would
do much to generate a habit or disposition of mind very
unfavorable to the recognition of Christian theism ; but that
would be no argument for tlie truth of tlieir science or phi-
losophy. The Cosmists — a polite name for atheists — fail to
recognize theism, not because thcj' have or pretend to have
any scientific evidence of its falsity, but really because it
does not lie in the sphere of their investigations. " I have
never seen God at the end of my telescope," said the astron-
omer, Lalande ; yet perhaps it never occurred to him that if
there were no God, there could be no astronomy. L The
Cosmists confine their investigations to the cosmic phenom-
ena and their laws, and God is neither a cosmic phenomenon
nor a cosmic law ; how then should they recognize him ?
They do not find God, because he is not in the order of facts
with which they are engrossed, though not one of tliose
facts docs or could exist without him.

rV. NO PURELY COSMIC SCIENCE.

Theism being in possession, and holding from prescrip-
tion, can be ousted onlj- by establishing the title of an
adverse claimant. This, we have seen, tlie atheist cannot
do. The cosmic philosophers confess that science is unable
to prove that God is not. They confess, then, that tliey
Lave no scientitic truth to oppose to his being, or that con-
tradicts it. It is true, they add, that science is equally
unable to prove that God is ; but that is our alfair, and per-

14 KEFDTATION OF ATHEISM.

haps we shall, before we close, prove the contrary. Bnt it
is enough for us at present to know that the Cosmists or
atheists confess that they have no scientific truth that proves
that God is not.

Indeed they do not propose to get rid of Cliristian theism
by disproving it, or bj proving their atheism, but bj^ turn-
ing away the mind from its contemplation, and generating
in' the community habits of mind adverse to its reception-..
Take the following extract from one of Mr. Fiske's lectures
in proof :

" It is, indeed, generally true that theories concerning the supernatural
perish, not from extraneous violence, but from inanition. The belief in
witchcraft, or the physical intervention of the devil in human affairs, is
now laughed at; yet two centuries have hardly elapsed since it was held
by learned and sensible men, as an essential part of Christianity. It was
supported by an immense amount of testimony which no one has ever
refuted in detail. No one bas ever disproved witchcraft, as Young dis-
proved the corpuscular theory of light. But the belief has died out
because scientific cultivation has rendered tlie viental soil unfit for it.
The contemporaries of Bodiu were so thoroughly predisposed by their
general theory of things to believe in the continual intervention of the
devil, that it needed but the slightest evidence to make them credit any
particular act of intervention. But to the educated men of to-day such
intervention seems too improbable to be admitted on any amount of tes-
timony. The hypothesis of diabolic interference is simply ruled out, and
will remain ruled out.

"So with Spiritualism (spiritism), the modern form of totemism, or
the belief in the physical intervention of the souls of the dead in human
affairs. ]\Ien of science decline to waste their time in arguing against it,
because they know that the only way in which to destroy it is to educate
people in science. Spiritualism (spiritism) is simply one of the weeds
which spring up in minds uncultivated by science. There is no use in
pulling up ono form of the superstition by the roots, for another form,
equally nosiou?. is sure to take root; the only way of iusurmg the
dL'Struction ol the pests is to sow the seeds of scientific truth. When,
therefore, we arc gravely told what persons of undoubted veracity have
seen, we arc affected about as if a friend should come in and assure us
upon his honor as a gentleman that heat is not a mode of motion.

" The case is the same with the belief in miracles, or the physical inter-
vention of the Deity in human alfairs. To the theologian such interven-
tion is a priori so probable that he needs but slight historic testimony to
make liim believe in it. To the scientific thinker it is a priori so improb-
able, that no amount of historic testimony, such as can be produced,
Buffices to make him entertain the hypothesis for an instant. Hence it
is that such critics as Strauss and Renan, to the great disgust of thcolo-

NO PUKELT COSMIC SCIENCE. 15

gians, always assume, prior to argument, that miraculous narratives are
legendary. Hence it is that when the slowly dying belief in miracles
finally perishes, it will not be because any one will ever have refuted it by
an array of syllogisms — the syllogisms of the theologian and those of the
scientist have no convincing power as against each other, because
neither accepts the major premise of the other — but it will be because
the belief is discordant with the mental Jiabits induced by the general
study of science.

"Hence it is that the cosmic philosopher is averse to prosclytism, and
has no sympathy with radicalism or mfidelity. For he knows tliat the
theological habits of thought are relatively useful, while scepticism, if
permanent, is intellectually and morally pernicious; witness the curious
fact that radicals are prone to adopt retrogade social theories. Knowing
this, he knows that the only way to destroy theological habits of thought
•without detriment is to nurture scientific habits — which stifle the former
as surely as clover stifles weeds."

A more apt illustration would have been, "as sure as the
weeds stiHe the coi-n." But it is evident from this extract
that the cosmic philosophers are aware of their inability to
overthrow Christian theism by any direct proof, or by any
truth, scientiiically verifiable, opposed to it. They trust to
what in military parlance might be called "a flank move-
ment." They aim to turn tlie impregnable position of the
theist, and defeat liim by taking possession of the back
country from which he draws his supplies. They would get
rid of theism by generating mental habits that exclude it, as
the spirit of the age excludes belief in miracles, in spiritism,
and the supernatural in any and every form. This is an old
device. It was attempted in the system of education
devised for France by the Convention of 1793-'91 ; that
devised the new antichristian calendar ; but it did not prove
effectual. The Prinve and Princess Gallitzin brought up
their oidy son Dmitri after the approved philosophy of the
day, in profound ignorance of the doctrines and principles
of religion ; but he became a Christian notwithstanding, a
priest even, and died a devoted and self-sacriticing mission-
ary in wjiat were then the wilds of "Western Pennsylvania.
And after a brief saturnalia of atheism and blood, France
lierself I'oturned to her Christian calendar, reopened the
churches she had closed, and reconsecrated the altars she had
profaned.

The belief in miracles may have perished among the Cos-
mists, but it is still living and vigorous in the minds of men
who yield nothing, to say the least, in scientitic culture and

16 REFUTATION OF ATHEISM

attainments, to the cbsniic philosophers themselves. The
belief in a personal devil, who tempts men throngli their lusts,
and works in the children of disobedience, has not perished,
and is still firmly held by the better educated and the more
enlightened portion of mankind ; and scientific men in no
sense inferior to Mr. Fiske, Plerbert Spencer, or Auguste
Comte, have investigated the facts alleged by the spiritists —
not sjmntualists, for spiritualists they are not — and found no
difficulty in recognizing among them facts of a superhuman
and diabolical origin. The first believers in spiritism we
ever encountered were persons we had previously known as
avowed atheists or cosmic philosophers. The men who can
accept tlie Cosmic philosophy may deny God, may deny or
accept any thing, but they should never speak of science.

That miracles are iinprobalile a priori to the Cosmists
may be true enough ; that they are so to men of genuine
science is not yet proven. Before they can be pronounced
improbable or incapable of being proved, it must be proved
that the supernatural or supercosmic does not exist; but
this the Cosmists admit cannot be proved. They own they
cannot prove that God does not exist, and if he does exist,
lie is necessarily snpercosmic or supernatural ; and the cos-
mos itself is a miracle, and a standing miracle, before the
eyes of ail men from the beginning. A miracle is what
God does by himself immediately, as the natural is what he
does mediately, through the agency of second or created
causes, or does as causa causanun^ tliat is, as causa eminens.
A miracle, then, is no more improbable than the fact of
creation, and no more incapable of pi-oof than the existence
of the cosmos itself. Hume's assertion that no amount of
testimony is sufficient to prove a miracle, for it is always
more in accordance with experience to' believe the witnesses
lie, than it is to believe that nature goes out of iier way to
work a miracle, is founded on a total misapprehension of
what is meant by a miracle. Nature does not work the
miracle; but God, the author of nature, works it; nor does
nature in the miracle go out of her way, or deviate from her
course. Her course and her laws remain unchanged. Tlie
miracle is the introduction or creation of a new fact by the
power that creates nature herself, and is as provable by ade-
quate testimony as is any natural fact whatever.

The Cosmists should bear in mind that when they rele-
gate principles and causes, all except the cosmic phenomena
and the law of their evolution, to the unknowable, the

NO PURELY COSlVnC SCIENCE. 17

unknowable is not necessarily non-existent, and should
remember also that what is unknowable to them may be not
only knowable but actually known to others. Onr own
ignorance is not a safe rule by which to determine the
knowledge of others, or the line between the knowable and
the unknowable.

" There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,
Than are dreamt of in your philosophy."

For aught the Cosmist can say, there may be in the
unknowable, principles and causes which render miracles
not only possible but probable, and the supernatural as rea-
sonable, to say the least, as the natural.

Indeed, the cosmic philosophers tliemselves, when it suits
their purpose, distinguish between the unknowable and the
non-existent, and contend that they are not atheists, because,
though they exile God to the dark region of tlie unknow-
able, they do not deny that he exists. They deny what
they call the "Christian theory of a personal or anthropo-
morphous God," but not the existence of an infinite Being,
Power, Force, or Reality, that underlies the cosmic phe-
nomena, and which appears or is manifested in them. They
actually assert the existence of such Being, and concede that
the cosmic plienomenaare "unthinkable" without it, though
it is itself absohitely unknowable. Here is the admission at
least that the unknowable exists, and that without it there
would and could be no knowable.

But the theory they deny is not Christian theism. The
Christian theist undoubtedly asserts the pc'-sonality of God,,
but not that God is anthropomorphous, God is not made in
the image of man, but man is made in the image and like-
ness of God. Man is not the tyjie of God, l)ut in God is
the prototype of man; that is to say, man has his type in-
God, in the idea exemplaris in the divine miiul^ and as th&
idea in the divine mind is nothing else than the essence of
God, the schoolmen say DeusshnlUtudo <;st. rertnn mnyi iuvi.
Personality is the last comj)lement of rational nature, or
supjjositiua inteliigens. An impersonal God is vio God ac
all, for he lacks the complement of his nature, is incomplete,
and falls into the category of nature. So m denying the
personality of God, the Cosniists do really deny God, and
are literally atheists. ;'t '■^'■'l, '■ ^ " '

The unknowable Infinite Bcing'^Power, Force, or Iloal-
ity, the Spenccrian philosoplxcrs a.ssert, is not God, and they

18 REFUTATION OF ATHEISM.

neitlier call nor regard it as God. In the lirst place^f
absolutely unknowable, it is not, in any sense, thinkable, or
assertable, but must be to our intelligence precisely as if it
were not. /In the next place, if these philosophers mean by
the unknowable tlie incomprehensible, not simply the inap-
prehensible, wliich we charitably suppose is the fact, they
still do not escape atheism ; for the power or force they
assert is not distinct from the cosmos, but is the reality,
being, or substance of the cosmos, or the real cosmos of
which the knowable or phenomenal cosmos is the appear-
ance or manifestation. It is the assertion of nothing super-
cosmic or independent of the cosmos. Nothing is asserted
but the real in addition to the phenomenal cosmos. Cer-
tainly the cosmic philosophers are themselves deplorably
ignorant of Christian theolog3% or else they count largely
on the ignorance of the public they address. Perhaps both
suppositions are admissible.

The Cosmists, who present us the latest form of atheism,
divide all things into knowable and unknowable. The
unknowable they must concede is at least unknown, and con-
sequently all their knowledge or science is confined to the
knowable ; and according to them the knowable is restricted
to the phenomenal. Ilence their science is simply the
science of the phenomenal, and this is wherefore they assert
the relativity of all knowledge. But there is no science of
phenomena alone. Science, strictly taken, is the reduction
of facts or phenomena to the principle or cause on which
tliey depend, and which explains them. Science, properly
speaking, is the science of principles or causes, as delined
by Aristotle, and where there are no known causes or prin-
ciples there is no science. The Cosmists, and even the Posi-
tivists, place all principles and causes in the unknowable,
and consequently neither have nor can have any science.
They therefore have not, and cannot have any scientific
truth or principle, as we have already shown, to oppose to
Ciiristian theism.

The Cosmists restrict all knowledge to the knowledge of
the cosmic phenomena, and their laws, which are then)selves
phenomenal ; but phenomena are not knowable in thein-
selves, for they do not exist in themselves. Regarded as
pure phenomena, detached from the being or substance
which appears in them, they are simply nothing. They are
cognizable only in the cognition of that which they mani-
fest, or of whicli they are appearances. But Herbert

NO PURELY COSMIC SCIENCE. 19

Spencer places that, whatever it is, in the category of the
unknowable, and consequently denies not only all science,
but all knowledge of any sort or degree whatever.

It is a cardinal principle with the Spencerian school that
iill knowledge is relative, that is, knowledge of the relative
only. But the assumption of the relativity of all knowledge
is incompatible with the assertion of any knowledge at all.
Sir William Hamilton indeed maintains the relativity of all
knowledge, but he had the grace to admit that all philosophy
ends in nescience. The relativity of knowledge means
cither that we know things not as they really are, a i^nrte rei^
but only as they exist to us, as aifections of our own con-
sciousness ; or that we know not the reality, but only phe-
nomena or appearances.* The Cosmists take it in botli
senses ; but chietly in the latter sense, as they profess to
follow the objective method as opposed to the subjective.
In either sense they deny all knowledge. Consciousness is
the recognitii)n of ourselves as cognitive subject, in the act of
knowing what is not ourselves, or what is objective. If no
object is cognized, there is no recognition of ourselves or fact
of consciousness, And cousecpiently no affection of conscious-
ness. The soul does not know itself in itself, for it is not
intelligible in itself: since, as St. Thomas says, it is not
intelligence in itself, therefore' it can know itself only in
acting; and having only a dependent, not an independent,
existence, it has need, in order to act, of the counter activity
of that which is not itself. Hence every thought is a com-
plex act, including, as will be more fully explained further
on, simultaneously and inseparably, subject, object, and
their relation. If no object, theu no thought; and if no
thought then, of course, no knowledge.

In the second sense, they ecpially deny all knowledge.
Phenomena are relative to their being or substance, and are
knowable only in the intuition of substance or being, and
relations are cognizable only in the relata, for apart from
the relata they do not exist, and are nothing. The relative
is therefore incognizable without the intuition'of the abso-
lute, for without the absolute it is nothing, and nothing is
not cognizable or cogitable. By placing the absolute, that

* The relativity of knowledge may also mean, and perhaps is some-
times taken to mean, that we know thin;,rs not absolutely in themselves,
but in their relations. This is true, but. it does not make the knowledge
relative, or knowledge of relations only, for relations arc apprehensible
only in the apprehension of the reUiki.

20 REFUTAnoN OF ATHEISM.

is, real being or substance, in the unknowable, the Cosmist^
really place the relative or the phenomenal also in the
unknowable. If, then, we assert the relativity of all knowl-
edge, and restrict the knowable to the relative and phenom-
enal, as did Protagoras and other Greek sophists castigated
by Socrates or Plato, we necessarily deny all knowledge and
even the possibility of knowledge.

Plato maintained that the science is not in knowing the
phenomenal, but in knowing by means of the phenomenal
the idea, substance, or reality it manifests, or of which it is
the appearance, or image. He held that the idea is im-
pressed on matter as the seal on wax, but that the science
consists in knowing, by means of the impression, the idea
or reality impressed, not in simply knowing the impression
or phenomenal. Hence he held that all science kper ideam,
or per imagmer/i. using the word idea to express alike the
reality impressed, and the impression or image. He teaches
that there is science only in rising, by means of the image
impressed on matter — the mimesis in his language, the phe-
nomenal in the language of our scientists — to the methexis,.
or participation of the divine idea, or the essence of the
thing itself, which the phenomenal or the sensible copies,
mimics, or imitates. Aristotle denies that all knowledge is
relative, and teaches that all knowledge is per speciem or
per for mam, substantially Plato's doctrine, that all knowledge
is per ideam I but he never held that science consisted in
knowing the species, whether intelligible or sensible. Tiie
science consisted in knowing by it the substantial form repre-
sented, presented, as we should say, by the species to the
mind.

Certain it is that there is no knowledge where there is
nothing known, or where there is nothing to be known.
The phenomenon is not the thing any more than the image
is the thing imaged, and apprehension of the image is sci-
ence only in so far as it serves as a medium of knowing the
thing it represents. We know nothing in knowing the sign,
if we know not that which it signifies. A sign signifying
nothing to the mind is nothing, not even a sign. So of phe-
nomena. They are nothing save in the reality they mani-
fest, or of which they are the appearaTices, and if they mani-
fest or signify nothing to the understanding, they are not
even appearances. If, then, the reality, the nomaenon, as
Xant calls it, is relegated to the unknowable, there is no
phenomenon, manifestation, or appearance in the region of

NO PUKELY COSiUC SCIENCE. 21

the knowable, and consequently nothing knowable, and
therefore no actual or possible knowledge.

Either the phenomenal is the appearance or manifestation
of some real existence, or it is not. If it is, then it is a
grave mistake to relegate the real being or substance to the
category of the unknowable ; for what appears, or is mani-
fest, is neither unknowable nor unknowui. If it is not, if
the cosmic phenomena are the appearance or manifestation
of no reality, then in knowing them, nothing is known, and
there is no knowledge at all.

The Positivists differ from the Cosraists, unless their name
is ill chosen, in asserting that, as far as it goes, knowledge
is positive, and not simply relative ; but then they have no
ground for the unity of science, which they assert, or for the
coordination of all the sciences under one superior science
which embraces and unifies them all, and which they profess
to have discovered, and on which they insist as their pe-
culiar merit. They reject all metaphysical principles, and
among them the relation of cause and effect, and then must,
if consistent, reject genera and species, and regard each
object apprehended as an independent and self-existent
being, or as an absolute existence ; that is to say, they must
assert as many gods as there are distinct objects or unit in-
dividualities intellectually apprehensible, for no existence
dependent on another is apprehensible except under the re-
lation of dependence. The contingent is apprehensible only
under the relation of contingency, and that relation is ap-
prehensible only in the apprehension of its correlative;
therefore the contingent is not apprehensible without intui-
tion of the necessary and independent. Things can be pos-
itively known by themselves alone, only on condition that
they exist by themselves alone. This, applied to the cosmos,
would deny in it, or any of its parts, all change, all move-
ment, all progress of man and society, which the Positivists
i30 strenuously assert. The Positivists, by rejecting the re-
lation of cause and effect, and all metaphysical relations
which are real not abstract relations, really deny, as do the
Oosmists, all red knowledge, for all knowledge, every affir-
mation, every empirical judgment, presupposes the relation
of cause and effect.

The Cosmists are so well aware that there is no science
of the phenomenal alone, that they abandon their own prin-
ciples, admit that the relative is unthinkable without the ab-
solute, and concede that we are compelled, in order to think

22 REFUTATION OF ATHEISM.

le

the plienomenal, to think an infinite reality on which tl
phenomenal depends. What is thinkable is knowable, and
therefore they assume that their unknowable is knowable,
and deny their cardinal principle that all knowledge is rela-
tive. An extract from another lecture by Mr. Fiske bears
out this assertion.

" Upon what grounds did we assert of the Deity that it is unknow-
able? We were driven to the conchision that the Deity is unknowable
because that which exists independently of intelligence and out of rela-
tion to it, which presents neither likeness, difference, nor relation, cannot
be cognized. Now, by precisely the same process, we were driven to
the conclusion that the cosmos is unknowable only in so far as it is abso-
lute. It is only as existing independently of our intelligence and out of
relation to it, that we predicate unknowableness of the cosmos. As man-
ifested to our intelligence, the cosmos is the universe of phenomena — the
realm of the knowable. We know stars and planets, we know the sur-
face of our earth, we know life and mind in their various manifestations,
individual and social ; and while we apply to this vast aggregate of phe-
nomena the name universe, we can bj'nom.'ans predicate identitj^ of the
imiverse and the Deity. To do so would be to confound phenomena
with noumena, the relative with the absolute, the knowable with the
unknowable. It would be, in short, to commit the error of pantheism.

■ ' But underlying this aggi'egate of phenomena, to whose; extension we
know no limit in space or time, we are compelled to postulate an absolute
Reality, a Something whose existence does not depend on the presence
of a percipient mind — which existed before the genesis of intelligence
and will continue to exist even though intelligence vanish from the scene.
In other words, there is a synthesis of phenomena which we know as-
affections of our consciousness. Instead of regarding these phenomena
as generated within our consciousness, and referable solely to it for their
existence, we are compelled to regard them as the manife.stations of some
absolute reality, which, as knowable only through its phenomenal mani-
festations, is in itself unknowable. This is the whole story; and whether
we call this absolute reality the Deity or the objective world of noumena,
seems to me to depend solely upon the attitude, religious or scientific,
which we assume in dealing with the subject."

The cosmic philosopher in order to know phenomena, i»
compelled to postulate an absolute reality ffs the g-round or
substance of the phenomena, and which is knowable through
their manifestation ; consequently, to restrict the knowable
to the phenomenal and relative is only declaring that all
knowledge is impossi])le. The Cosmists concede it, autl
therefore make what they declare to be absolutely unknow-
able, in a certain degree at least, knowable, concede that we

NO PURELY COSMIC SCIENCE. 23

maj and do know that it is, and what it is in relation to the
cosmic phenomena, thouo-li not what it is in itself. But
wlij are we compelled to postulate the absolute reality, but
because the phenomena are not knowable without intuition
of the reality which they manifest ? or because in appre-
liending the phenomenal we really have intuition of the
absolute or the reality manifested ?

Mr, Fiske, however, even after abandoning the doctrine
that th/3 absolute or real is unknowable, by no means escapes
atheism. The absolute reality, Force, or Something- which
he asserts as underlying the aggregate of the cosmic phe-
nomena, which aggregate of phenomena he calls universe, is
not God, as he would have us admit, but is merely the cos-
mic reality of which the cosmic phenomena are the appear-
ance, and distinguishable from it only as the appearance is
distinguishable from that which appears. It is, as we have
already shown, only the real cosmos, the being or substance of
which the cosmic phenomena are the manifestation. It
makes the "Deity'' it assei'ts identically the. substance of
the cosmic phenomena, which is either pure pantheism or
pure atheism, as yoii call it either God or cosmos, that is,
nature, since it is indistinguishable from the real cosmos,
and distinguishable only from the cosmic phenomena. The
cosmic philosophy does not, then, as it pretends, solve the
religious problem and reconcile atheism and theism in a
' iglier generalization than either, as Herbert Spencer main-
tains.

Plerbert Spencer, in his First Principles of a New System
of Philosophy,^ says, "that with regard to the origin of the
universe or cosmos, three verbally intelligible suppositions
may be made : 1, the universe is self-existent ; 2, the uni-
verse is self-created ; and 3, the universe is created by an
external" — or, as we should express it, a supercosmic —
"agency." He rejects all three as absolutely inconceiv-
able. If the cosmos is neither self-existent nor self-created,
nor yet created I>y an external agency, that is, by a power
above it and independent of it, it cannot exist at all, and
Mr. Spencer simply asserts universal nihilism and of course
universal nescience ; for where nothing is or exists, there
can be no knowledge or science. Negation is intelligible
only by virtue of the affirmation it denies.

The author refutes the iirst two of the three suppositions con-

* Part T. Xo. 11, 2d edition.

24 KEFDTATION OF ATHEISM.

cliisively enough, and we grant liim that the cosmos is neither
self-existent nor self-created. Then either it does not exist,
and then no cosmic science ; or it is created by an independ-
ent, supereosmic agency or power, and then it is contingent,
and dependent on its canse, or the power that creates it.
If so, there can be no purely cosmic science ; for the depend-
ent is not cognizable without intuition of the independent,
nor the contingent without intuition of the necessary, as we
shall prove at length, when we come to the positive proofs
of Christian theism.

This is sufhcient to prove that there is and can be no purely
cosmic science, even by the confession of the latest atheistic
school we are acquainted with. It is idle then to pretend to
controvert Christian theism in the name of science ; for if
it be denied, all science, all knowledge is denied. The
Spencerian pliilosophy is therefore simply elaborated ignor-
ance, and pure emptiness.

V. THKOLOGIANS AND THE SCIENTISTS.

It is not pretended that atheists, Cosmists, or Comtists,
have, as a matter of fact, no science ; that they have made
no successful cosmic investigations, or hit upon no impor-
tant discoveries and inventions in the material or sensible
ordej\ It is readily admitted that the patient labors and
unwearied researches and explorations of the scientists, both
tlieists and non-theists, in the lields of physical science,
have enlarged the boundaries of our knowledge, and given
to man a mastery over the forces of nature on which no
little of what is called modern civilization depends. What
is denied is, that the scientists, Comtists, or Cosmists, have
discovered or attained to any scientific truth that coniiicts
with Christian theology, and that on their own principles
they have or can have any science at all.

The Cosmists and Comtists have senses and intellect as
well as others ; and there is no reason in the world, while
they confine themselves to the observation and classihcation
of physical facts, and so long as they allow free scope to
their intellectual faculties and do not attempt to force their
action to conform to their preconceived theories, why they
should not arrive at sound inductions. The human mind is
truer than their theories, and broader than their so-called
science ; and when suffered to act according to its own laws
proves its natural object is truth. So long as they confine

THEOLOGIANS AJ^TD SCIENTISTS. 25

their investisjations within the respective fields of the special
sciences, and use the natural faculties with which they are
endowed, they can and often do lal>or successfully. Lalande
was a respectable astronomer ; the Ilecanique Celeste of
the atheist, La Place is more than respectable for the mathe-
matical genius and knowledge it displays; Alexander von
Humboldt's Cosmos is an encyclopaedia of physical
sciences, as they stood in his day ; but in all these and otiier
instances the human mind holds intuitively pi'inciples which
transcend the finite and the phenomenal, and without which
there could have been no science ; but principles which both
the cosmic and Comtean theories- exclude from the realm of
the knowable. It is not the facts alleged that are objected
to, but the false theories advanced in explanation of them,
the conclusion's drawn from them, and the application of
these conclusions to an order that transcends the order to
which the facts belong, and which, if valid, would exclude
the facts themselves.

The atheistic scientists exclude theology and metapliysics
from the knowable simply because they are too ignorant of
those sciences to be aware that without the principles whicli
they supply there could be no physical science ; or to know
that in asserting physical science they really assert the very
principles they theoretically deny. Professor Huxley asserts
protoplasm as the physical basis of life ; yet he denies that
there is any cognition or even intuition of the relation of
cause and effect. How then can he assert any nexus or
causative relation between protoplasm and life ? He does
not pretend that protoplasm is life ; he only pretends that
it is its physical basis. But how can it be its physical basis if
there is between it and life no necessary relation of cause
iind effect 'I Or if protoplasm is not known to be the prin-
ciple or basis of life, how can it be known to produce or
support it ? But principles and relations, we are told, are
metaphysical, and therefore excluded from the knowable.
Protoplasm, the professor owns, is dead matter ; how, then
without a cause of some sort vivifying it, can it become
livliKj matter ? What is protested against is not the asser-
tion of protoplasm as the physical or material basis of life,
— though we believe nothing of the sort, for proteine is ag
imaginary as the plastic soul dreamed of by Plato ana
adopted by Cudworth and Gioberti, — but the denial of the
principle of cause and effect, and then assuming it as the

26 REFUTATION OF ATHEISM.

principle of our conclusions, or asserting as scientific, con-
clusions which can have no validity without it.

Professor Huxley follows Hume, who denies that we have
any knowledge, by experience, of causative force, or tliat
the antecedent produces the consequence. Dr.^ Thomas
Brown, who succeeded Dugald Stewart in the chair of phi-
losophy in tlie Edinburgh University, maintains the same,
and resolves the relation of cause and effect into the relation
of invariable antecedence and consequence, or simply a
relation of time. Yet if the antecedent only goes before
the consequent, without producing or placing it, no con-
clusion is possible. Induction is reasoning as much as
deduction, and all reasoning is syllogistic in principle, if
not in form; and there is no syllogism witUout a middle
term, and there is no middle term without the principle of
cause and effect, which connects necessarily the conclusion
with the premises, the antecedent with the consequent, as
cause and effect. Deny causality and you deny all reason-
ing, all logical relations, and can assert no real relation
between protoplasm, or any thing else, and life.

The atheist and Sir William Hamilton exclude the infinite
from the cognizable and declare it incogitable ; and yet
either in his geometry will talk of lines that may be infin-
itely extended, which cannot be done without thinking the
infinite. If there is no infinitely real, how can there be the
infinitely possible ? If there is no infinite being, there can
be no infinite ability ; if no infinite ability, there is no infi-
nitely possible, and then no infinitely possible geometrical
lines" Truly, then, has it been said, " an atheist may be a
geometrician, but if there were no God, there could be no
geometry." In mathematics, which is a mixed science,
there is an ideal and apodictic element on which the empiri-
cal element depends, and the apodictic is not cogitable
without intuition of infinite being and its creative act, any
more than is the empirical itself ; yet both Cosmists and
Comtists hold mathematics to be a positive science.

Herbert Spencer asserts the relativity of all knowledge,
and he. Sir AV^illiam Hamilton, and Dr. Mansel deny that
the absolute can be known. Butiboth relative and absolute
are metaphysical conceptions, and'^onnote one another, and
neither can be known by itself alone, or without cognition
or intuition of the other.J Other instances might be adduced,
and will be soon, in which the Cosmists use, so to speak,
principles which they either deny or declare to be unknow-

THEOLOGIANS AND SCIENTISTS. 27

able, and which are really theological or metaphysical prin-
ciples, and it is by those principles tliat they are able to
know any thing at all beyond the intelligence they have in
common with the beasts that perish. Not heeding these,
they fall, in the constrnction of their theories, systematically
into errors, which when they trust their own minds and fol-
low their common sense, they avoid as do other men.

As Cousin somewhere remarks, there may be less in phi-
losophy than in common sense, in reflection than in intuition,
but there can never be more. The intuitions, or what Cousin
calls the primitive or spontaneous beliefs of mankind, are
the same in all men ; and the differences among men begin
the moment they begin to reflect on the data furnished by
intuition, and attempt to explain them, to render an account
of them to themselves, or, in other words, to philosophize.
The scientists have the same intuitions, though atheists, that
other men have, and in the field of the special sciences they
are equally trustworthy ; it is only when they leave the field
of the sciences and enter that of philosophy, which with us
is the name for what is commonly called natural theology,
and which is the science of principles, that they err. Habit-
uated to the study of physical facts alone, they overlook or
deny an order of facts as real, as evident, as certain, as any of
the physical facts they have observed and classified according
to their real or supposed physical laws, and even ulterior, and
without which the physical facts and laws would not and
could not exist. \Jt is not as scientists they specially err,
but as philosophers and theologians, that is, in the account
they render of the origin, principles, and meaning of the
cosmic facts they observe and classify.

It is not with science or the cultivation of the sciences that
philosophers and theologians quarrel, and it is very possible
that philosophers and tiieologians have at times been too
indifferent to the study of physical facts or the cultivation of
the so-called natural sciences, and have, in consequence, lost
with the phj'sicists much of the influence they might other-
wise have retained. Yet it is a great mistake, not to say
a calumny, to accuse them of holding that the facts of the
physical order can be determined, a priori, by a knowledge
of metaphysical or theological principles. The scholastics
of the middle ages held this no more than did my Lord
Bacon himself. Observation and induction were as much
their method as they were his. Bacon invented or discov-
ered no new method, as is conceded by Lord Macaulay him-

28 KEFUTATJON OF ATUKISM,

self; all he did was to give an additioual impulse to the
study of material nature, towards which the age in which he
lived was already turning its attention, as a necessary couse-
Cjuence of Luther's movement in an nntlieological direction.
Yet Bacon maintained strenuously that the method which
he recommended to be followed in the study of the physical
sciences is wholly inapplicable to the study of metaphysical
science or philosophy. His pretended followers have over-
looked what he had the good sense to say on this point ;
have assumed that his method is as applicable in the study
of principles as in the study of facts, and, consequently,
have made shipwreck of both philosopliy and science. The
result of their error may be seen in Herbert Spencer's
theory of evolution, which is only the revival of the doc-
trine of the Greek sopliists, refuted by Plato and Aristotle,
especially by Plato in his Theaatetus.

The quarrel with the scientists is with them, hot as scien-
tists or physicists, but with them as philosophers and the-
ologians ; and as philosophers and theologians, because they
give us philosoph}^ or theology only as an induction from
physicial facts. If their induction were strictly logical it
could not be accepted, because the physical facts do not in-
clude all the elements of thought, and, in fact, constitute
only a part, and that the lowest part, either of the real or
the knowable. Their theories are too low and too narrow
for the real, and exclude the more elevated and universal
intuitions of the race. Induction is drawing a general con-
clusion from particular facts. To its validity the enumeration
of particulars must be complete, and it is only by virtue of
a principal that is universal and necessary that the conclu-
sion can be drawn, otherwise it is a mere abstraction. The
induction from physical facts may be perfectly valid in the
order of physical facts, as applied to the special class of
physical facts generalized, and yet be of no validity when
apphed beyond that class and to a different order of facts.
Tlie inductions of the chemist, the mechanic, the electrician,
may be perfectly just when applied to dead matter, and yet
be wholly inadmissible when applied to the living subject.
This is the mistake into which Professor Huxley falls in
regard to his physical basis of life. His analysis of pro-
toplasm may be very just, but it is operated on a dead subr
ject, and no conclusion from it, applied to the living subject,
is valid; for in the living subject it is an element or a fact
that no chemical analysis can detect, and hence no chemical

THEOLOGIANS AND SCIENTISTS. 29

synthesis can recombine the several components the analysis
detects so as to reproduce living protoplasm. Tlie induction
is not valid, for it does not enumerate all the facts, and also
because it exceeds the order of facts analyzed. So when
Herbert Spencer tells us in his Biology tliut '' life is the result
of the mechanical, cliemical, and electrical arrangement of the
particles of matter," he di-aws a conclusion which goes beyond
the facts he has analyzed, and assumes it to be valid even
when applied to a diti'erent order of facts. The physiologist
commits the same error when he infers the qualities of the
living blood from the analysis of dead blood, — the only blood
which, from the nature of the case, he can analyze. Hence,
chemical physiology is far from being scientific, and the
pathology founded on morbid anatomy, or the dissection' of
the dead subject, is far from being uniformly trustworthy.

Many theologians fall into an analogous error, and seek
to infer God by way of induction from the physical facts
observed in nature, — the very facts from which the atheist
concludes there is no God, The late Pcre Gratry, in his
Connaissance de Dieu, contends with rare earnestness and
eloquence that the existence of God is proved by induction.
Dr. McCosh, resting the whole argument against the atheist
on murks of design, which is an induction from particular
facts, does the same. 1 Induction is really only an abstraction
or generalization, antlat best the God obtainable by induc-
tion can be only a generalization, and God as a generali-
zation or an abstraction is simply no God at all ; for he
would be nothing distinct from or independent of the facts
generalized. Pere Gratry was a mathematician, and arrived
at God in the same way that the mathematician in the
calculus arrives at infinitesimals, that is, by eliminating the
finite. But supposing there is intuition of the finite only,
the elimination of the finite would give us simply zero, not
the infinite.

Then there is another difficulty; the finite and infinite
arc correlatives, and coiTelatives connote each other, the one
cannot be known without the other, nor can either be logi-
cally inferred from the other. The principle of induction,
when it means any thing more than elassitication or abstrac-
tion, is the relation of cause and effect. But cause and
effect, again, are correlatives, — though not, as Sir William
Hnmilton asserts, reciprocal, — and therefore connote each
other, and cannot be known se]:)arately. The argument
from desiirn. otherwise called the teleoloirical argument or

30 BEFUTATION OF ATHEISM.

argument from the end or final cause, is open to a similar
objection. The final cause presupposes a first cause, and if
wo know not that there is a first cause, we cannot assert a
final cause, and therefore are unable to infer design. The
argument from design has its value when once it is deter-
mined that the universe has a first cause, or has been created,
and the question is not as to the existence, but as to the
attributes of that cause. Till then it simply begs the ques-
tion.J

The inductions of the physicists within the order of facts
observed, and when strictly logical, are valid enough, as
every day proves, by bringing them to the test of experi-
ment ; but in making them the physicist actually avails him-
self of the principle or the relation of cause and effect,
which he is able to do, because, as a matter of fact, he holds
it from intuition rejDresented by language, though it is only
the metaphysician or philosopher that takes note of it, or is
able to verify it. The inductions of the Cosmists drawn
professedly from physical facts alone, are invalid on their
own principles, because the Cosmists reject, at least as cog-
nizable, the relation of cause and effect, the principle of all
induction or synthetic reasoning; and are invalid also on
any principle when opposed to tiie metaphysician or theolo-
gian, because they are drawn from physical facts alone, and
do not include the facts of the intelligible and moral order,
in Avhich are the principle and cause of the physical facts
themselves.

This is still more the case, wlien we add to philosophy or
natural theology, the supernatural order, made known to us
by supernatural revelation. The Cosmists recognize and
study only the facts, or phenomena as they improperly call
them, of "the physical universe, and from these only physical
inductions are possible. They have only a physical world,
and their reasonings and conclusions, even when true within
that M'orld, are inapplicable to any thing beyond and above
it, and therefore can never prove any thing against theology,
natural or supernatural, and on their own principles, as we
have seen, their inductions are of no value beyond the limits
of the physical world itself. They err in taking a part of
the real or a part of the knowable for the whole. They
may say that they do not deny the reality of what they call
the unknowable, that is, being, principles, causes, &c. ; but
they have no right to say that all that transcends the order
of physical facts and their laws, the special subject of their

THEOLOGIANS AND SCIENTISTS. 31

study, is unlcnowable. It may be unknown to them, but it
may be both knowable and known to otliers. Also, bj' not
knowing what lies beyond the range of their own studies,
they may and do give a false account of their own science.
This is, in fact, really the case with them. Many of their
inductions are valid in the physical order, as experiment
proves; but without the intuition of the metaphysical rela-
tion of cause and etfect the mind could make no induction,
consequently they are wrong, and the ver^^ truth of their
inductions proves that they are wrong, in declaring that the
relation pertains to the unknowable.

The Cosmists do not err chiefly as physicists, but as phi-
losophers and theologians, and as long as they are contented
to be scientists and report simply the result of their scien-
tific researches and explorations there can be no quarrel with
them on the part either of theologians or philosophers ; but
the quarrel, as has been shown, begins when they attempt to
theorize, or to construct with their physical facts alone a
cosmic philosophy, and to saj' it cannot embrace, because no
philosophy based on physical facts alone can embrace, the
principle of all the real and all the knowable, since the
pliysical is neither the whole nor the principle of the whole ;
nor is it commensurate with the reality presented intuitively
to every mind.

Undoubtedly, neither the philosophy nor the theology can
be true that contradicts any physical fact, if fact it be, but
no explanation or theory of physical facts is admissible that
contradicts or denies any metaphysical or theological prin-
ciple.

There are no physical facts that contradict or in the slight-
est degree impugn Christian theism, as we hope to show in
this or a future essay. In point of fact, atheists, pantheists,
Cosmists, or Positivists, do not oppose or pretend to oppose
any facts to what they call "the theistical hypothesis," they
only oppose to it their inductions, their theories and hypoth-
eses, or their explanation of the class of facts that have
come under their observation. These, we have seen, are
untenable, for without the principles they are intended to
deny they cannot even be constructed. Kow, theories that
contradict their own principle can make nothing against
Christian theism, cannot disprove it, or cause in any mind
that understands the question, the slightest doubt of it, and
the theist has a perfect right to treat them with sovereign
contempt. At least, they assign no reason why Cliristian

32 KEFUTATION OF ATHEISM.

theism should be ousted from its possession. They cannot
overcome the argument from prescription, and phice Cliris-
tian theism on its defence, or compel it to produce its title-
deeds.

Here onr refutation of atheism properly ends, and no
more need be said ; but wliile Ave deny that we are bound
to do any thing more, we are disposed to produce onr title-
deeds and prove positively, by unanswerable arguments, the
falsity of atheism, or to demonstrate, as fully as logic can
demonstrate, Clu-istian theism.

VI. INCONCLUSIVE PEOOFS.

PniLOSOPnKRS and theologians do not necessarily adduce
the best possible arguments to prove their tlieses, and may
sometimes use very weak and even inconclusive arguments.
An argument for the existence of God may also seem to one
mind conclusive, and the reverse to another. Men usually
argue from their own point of view, and take as ultimate
the principles which tiiey have never doubted, or heard
questioned, although far from being in reality ultimate, and
thus take for granted what for others needs to be proved.
"Men also may hold the truth, be as well assured of it as they
are of their own existence, even possess great good sense and
sound judgment, and yet be very unskilful in defending it,
— utterly unable to assign good and valid reasons for it.
They know they are right, but know not how to prove it.

St. Thomas, the Doctor Angelicus, maintains'^ that the
existence of God is demonstrable, not from i)rinciples really a
_^^r/orf or universal, — fornotliinij;can be more universal or more
nltiniate than God from which his existence can be concluded,
since lie is the first principle alike in being and in knowing,
— but as the cause from the effect; and this he proves by
five different arguments : The first is drawn from the empi-
rical fact of motion and the necessity of a first mover, not
itself movable ; the second is drawn from the empirical fact
of particular etiicicnt causes and the necessity of a first effi-
cient cause, itself uncaused ; the third is taken from the
fact that some things are possible and some are not, and as
all things cannot be merely possible, therefore there must
be something which is per se, necessary, and m acta. The

* Sum. theol., part I, quacst. 1, art. 2 et 3.

EN^CONCLUSIVE PKOOFS. 33

fourth proof is drawn from tlie fact tliat there are different
degrees in things, some being more and others less good^
tnie, noble, peifect, and therefore demand the perfect alike
in the order of the true and the good, — a being in M'hom all
diversities are identitied and all degrees are included, and
which is their source and c omplement. The fifth is drawn
from the fact of order and government, and the necessity of
a supreme governor. These all conclnde God, if we may so
speak, from a fact of sensible experience, and arc empirical
proofs.

Dr. McCosli, president of Princeton College, T'J'ew Jersey^
a man of no mean philosopliical repute, relies wholly on the
principle of cause and effect, as does St. Tliomas, and dis-
misses all arguments but Paley's argument, or the argument
from design. Pere Gratry (now dead), of the New Oratory,,
relies, in his Connaissance de Dleu^ on induction from^
intellectual and ethical facts; the late Dr. Potter, Episcopa-
lian bishop of Pennsylvania, in his Philosophy of Relig-
ion^ does virtually the same. A writer in the British
Qnarterly Revieio for July, 1871, in a very able article on
Theism., examines and rejects all the arguments usually
adduced to prove that God is, except that drawn from intu-
ition, or, as we understand him, that which asserts the dii'ect
and immediate empirical intuition, of God, or the Divine
Being. Dr. Hodge, an eminent Presbyterian divine, in his
Sij^tematiG Theology, accepts all the arguments usually
adduced, some as proving one thing, and others as prov-
ing another pertaining to theism, and holds that no one
argument alone suffices to prove the whole. Dr. John
Henry Newman, in his Aj)ologia pro Vita svxi, says he
has never been able to prove to his own satisfaction the
existence of God by reason ; he can only prove it is
probable that there is a God, and appears to have writ-
ten his Grammxir of Assent to prove that probai)ility
is enough for all practical purposes, since we are obliged
in nearly all the ordinary affairs of life to act on probabilities
alone. Jlis belief in Ged he seems to derive from conscience.
The Holy See has decided against the Traditionalists that
the existence of God can be proved with certainty by rea-
soning pi-ior to faith, and the Holy See has also iniprobated
the doctrine of the Louvain professors, that we have imme-
diate cognition of God, — a doctrine improbated by reason
itself;, for if man had immediate cognition of God, no
proofs of his existence would bo necessary, since no man,

Vol. U.-3

34 KEFUTATIO.N OF ATHEISM.

could doubt his existence any more than his own, or than
that tlie sun shines at noonday in the heavens when his eyes
behold it.

The general tendency in our day is to conclude tlie cause
from tlie effect, and to conclnde God as designer, from the
marks of design, or the adaptation of msans to ends discov-
erable, or assumed to be discovei-able. in ourselves and the
external world. LTlie objection to all arguments of this sort,
that is to say, to all psychological, cosmological, and teleo-
logical arguments, which depend on the principle of cause
and effec't, is, that they all beg the question, or take for
granted what requires to be proved. They all assume that
the soul and cosmos are effects. Grant them to be effects,
it follows necessarily that they have had a cause, and a cause
adequate to the effect. As to that there can be no doubt.
Cause and effect are correlatives, and correlatives connote
0!ie another, and neither is knowable alone. Whan we
know any thing is an effect, we know it has a cause, whether
we know what that cause is or not. But how prove that the
soul or the cosmos is an effect? This the atheist denies, and
this is the point to be proved against him, and how is it to
be proved from the facts of experience tl

St. Thomas assumes, in his second proof, that we have
experience of particular efficient causes. This is denied by
Hume, Kant, Dr. Thomas Brown, Sir William Hamilton,
Dr. Mansel, and by all the Comtists, Cosmists, and atheists
of every species. "^Even Dr. Reid, the founder of the Scot-
tish school, denies that we know by experience any power
in the so-called cause that produces the effect, but contends
that we are obliged, by the very constitution of our nature
or of the human mind, to believe it. Kant agrees with
Reid, and makes the irresistible belief a form of the under-
standing. Huxley avowedly follows Hume, as do the great
body of non-Christian scientists. Dr. Brown says that all
we know of cause and effect is invariable antecedence and
consequence, and maintains that, so far as experience goes,
the relation of cause and effect is a relation of invariable
sequence, — simply a relation in the order of time. The
question does not stand where it did when St. Thomas wrote,
and to meet the speculations of the day we are obliged to go
behind him, and establish principles which he could take
for granted, or dismiss as inserted in human nature itself,
that 'is, as we say, intuitively given.

Even if experience could prove particular effects, and

INCONCLUSIVE PROOFS. 35

therefore particular and contingent efficient causes, we could
not conclude from them universal and necessary causes, or
the one universal cause, for tlie universal cannot be loo-icallj
concluded from the particular, and tiie God that could l)e
concluded would be only a generalization or abstraction, and
no real God at all. Or if this is denied, which it cannot
well be, God could be concluded only under the relation of
cause, as causa causaruin, if you please, but still only as effi-
cient causae, and therefore only as essentially cause, and sub-
stance or being only in that he is cause. This supposes liim
necessarily a cause, and obliged to cause in order to be or
exist. Tliis would make creation necessary, and God obliged
from the intrinsic necessity of his own nature to create, —
the error of Cousin, our old master, to wiiom we owe the best
part of our philosophical discipline. But this is only one of
the raanv forms of pantheism, itself only a form of atheism.

Dr. McCosh rests the whole question on the marks of
design in man and the cosmos. Design and designer are
correlatives, and connote each other; and consequently the
one cannot be proved as the condition of proving the other:
for the proof of the one is ipso facto the proof of both.
Prove design and you prove, of course, a designer. But
how prove design, if you know not as yet that the world
has been made or created? The most you can do is to prove
that there are in nature things analogous to what in the
works of man are the product of art or design ; but analogy
is not identity, and how do you prove that what you call
design is not nature, or natura naturans? Does the bee
construct its cell, the beaver its dam, or the swallow her nest
by intelligent design, as man builds his house? or by instinct,
the simple force of nature ? Paley's illustration of the watch
found by the traveller in a desert place is illusory: for the
Indian who saw a watch for the first time took it to be a
living thing, not a piece of mechanism or art.

But even granting the marks of design are proved, all that
can be concluded, is not a supercosmic God or Creator, but
simply that the world is ordered and governed by an intelli-
gent mind ; it does not necessarily carry us beyond the
Anima, mundi of Aristotle, or the Supreme Artificer of
Plato, operating with preexisting materials and doing the
best he can witii them. Tiiey do not authorize us to con-
clude the really supramundane God, by the sole energy of
liis word creating the heavens and the earth and all tilings
therein trum nothing, as asserted bj' Christian theism. They

36 REFUTATION OF ATHEISM

can be explained as well by supposing the causa immanent
with Spinoza, as by supposing a causa ejficiens.

The cosmologists niidei'take to conclude the existence of
God from the facts or plicnoinena of the universe. Th&
universe is contingent, dependent, insufficient for itself, and
therefore it must have had a creator and upholder, who is
himself necessar^^ not contingent, and is independent, self-
subsisting, self-sufficing. Nothing more true. But whence-
learn we that the universe is contingent, dependent, and
insufficient for itself? "\Ve know not this fact by experience
or empirical intuition. Besides, necessary and contingent
are correlatives, and there is no intuition of the one without
intuition of the other.

The psychologists profess to conclude God by way of
induction from the facts of the soul. Thus Descartes says,
Coyito, ergo sitm, and professes to deduce, after the manner
of the geometricians, God and the universe from his own
undeniable pei'sonal existence. Certainlj^ if God were not,
Descartes could not exist, but from the soul alone, only the
soul can be deduced, and from purely psychological facts
induction can give us only psychological generalizations or
laws. Take the several facts, attributes, or perfections of
the soul, and suppose them carried up to infinity, it would
still be only a generalization, for their substance would still
be the soul, distinct and diti'erent by nature from the divine
substance or being. God is not man com})leted ; nor is man,.
as Giuberti says, "an incipient God, or God who begins.'*
Man is indeed made in the image and likeness of God, not
God in the image and likeness of man. lie is not anthro-
ponu)rphous; though his likeness in which we are ci'cated
enables us to understand, by way of analogy, something of
Ills infinite attributes, and to hold, when not prevented by
sin and when elevated by grace, a more or less intimate-
conmumion with him. Christianity, indeed, teaches that
man is destined to union with God as his beatitude, but the
liuman personality remains ever distinct from the divine.

We arc not certain in what sense Bcj'e Gratry understands
induction. Bi'ubably our inability arises from our compara-
tive ignorance of mathematics, lie says the soul by induc-
tion darts at once to G(jd and seizes him, so to speak, by
intelligence and love, whatever all that may mean. We can
undei'stand the clan of the soul to God whom it knows and
loves, but we cannot understand how a soul ignorant of (xod
can, by an interior and sudden spring, jump to a knowledge-

mCONCLUSIVE PROOFS. 37

of him. Perc Gratry says the sonl arrives at the knowledge
of God as the mathematician in the calcuhis arrives at infini-
tesimals, namely, by eliminating the finite. Eliminate the
finite, he says, and yon have the infinite. Not at all, raon
Pore. Eliminate the finite, and you have, as we have already
said, simply zero. The infinite is not the negation of the
iinite. Infinitesimals again, are nothing, for there is and
can be no infinitely little./ The error comes right in the
end, so far as mathematics is concerned, for it is equal on
both sides, and the error on one side neutralizes the error
on the other side.

The late Dr. Potter, Protestant bishop of Pennsylvania,
relies on induction, and chiefly on induction from the ethical
facts of the soul. But the ethical argument to prove the
oxistence of God does not avail, for, till his existence is
proved, there is no basis for ethics. The soul has a capacity
to receive and obev a moral law, but that law is not founded
in its nature or imposed by it. The moral law pi'oceeds
from God as final cause of creation, as the physical laws
proceed from him as first cause, and is the law of our per-
fection, necessary to be obeyed in order to fulfil our des-
tiny, or to obtain our supreme good or beatitude. If there
is no God, there is and can be no moral law, and then no
morality. Till you know God is, and is the final cause of
the universe, you cannot call any facts of 'the soul ethical.

The argument of St. Anselm in his Monoloyium is the
fourth of" St. Thomas, and concludes God as the perfect
from the imperfect, of which we are conscious, or which we
know b}^ experience in ourselves, or as the complement
of man, an argument which contains a germ of truth, but
errs by overlooking the fact that the perfect and imperfect
are correlatives, and that the one cannot be inferred from the
other because the one is not cognizable or cogitable without
the other. St, Anselm himself seems not to have been
satisfied with the argument of his Monologium, and gave
fiiibsequently in his Proslogium, what he regarded as a
briefer and more conclusive ai-gument. We have in our
minds the idea of the most perfect being, a greater than which
cannot be thought. But greater is a being in re, than a
being in inteUeotu,. If then there is not in re a most per-
fect being, than which a greater cannot be thought or con-
ceived, then we can think a greater and more perfect being
than we can, which is a contradiction. Therefore the most
perfect being, a greater than which cannot be thought, does

38 REFUTATION <.)F ATHEISM.

and must exist in re, as well as in intellectu, since we cer-
tainl}'^ have the idea in our minds.

This argument would be conclusive if it were shown that
the idea is objective and an intuition, as we shall endeavor,
further on, to prove that it is. Leibnitz somewhere remarks
that it would be conclusive, if it were lirst proved that God
is |)Ossible, which shows tliat Leibnitz, with his universal
genius and erudition, could be as weak as ordinary mortals.
It was his weakness, in which he anticipated Hegel, to place
the possible prior to and independent of the real. If we
could suppose God not to exist in actu, we could not sup-
pose him to be possible; for possibility cannot actualize
itself and thei-e would be no real to reduce it to act. The
error of Hegel is in supposing the possible, for his reine
Seyn is merely possible being, precedes das Wesen, or the
real, and has in itself the tendency or aptness to become
real — das Wesen — the old Gnostic doctrine that makes all
things originate in the Byssus or Void.

There is no possible without the real, for possibility is the
ability of the i-eal. The possible in relation to God is what
God is able to do, and in i-elation to man is what man is able to-
do with the faculties God has given him. There is nothing,
we may add on which philosophers have, it seems to us, been
more puzzled, or more bewildered others, than on this very
question of possibility. If there were no actual, there would
and could be no possible, for possibility, prescinded from the
reality of the actual, is simply nothing. The excellent Father
Tongiorgi hnagines that possibility is not nothing, but even
something prescinded from the ability of the actual, and
indeed something which, like theya^!w?>^ of the Stoics, limits or
binds the power of God himself. Some things he holds are
possible, and others are impossible, even to God. He forgets
that nothing is impossible to God but to contradict, that is,
annihilate his own eternal and necessary being. He is hi&
own possibility, and the measui'eof the possible. It is hi&
being that founds the nature of things, about which philos-
ophers talk so much.

As to the argument of the Proslogium, its validity
depends on the sense in which the word idea is taken. If
we take it in a psychological sense, as a mere mental concep-
tion, the ai'gument may be a logical puzzle, but concludes
nothing.

If we suppose idea can exist in intellectu without existing
in re, the argument concludes at best only a psychological

INCONCLUSIVE PROOFS. 39

abstraction ; l)ut if we suj^pose tlie mental idea to be the
intuition of the real and objective, as we have jnst said, it
is valid and conclusive. St. Anselm seems to us to take idea
in a subjective sense and to conclude tlie objective from the
subjective ; if so, his argument is pjscholoo-ical, and, like
all psj'chological arguments, inconclusive. Yet he seems to
maintain that it is also objective, and that it could not exist
in mente, if it did not exist in re, and therefore conclusive.

Descartes deduces the existence of God from the soul, in
which the idea of God he holds, is innate. But what is
innate, that is, born in the soul and with it, is the soul, or at
least psychical ; consequently, the argument is psychological,
and proves nothing. Besides, Descartes, as is not seldom
the case with him, falls into a paralogism, and reasons in a
vicious circle ; he takes the idea in intellectit to prove that
God is, and the veracity of God to prove the objective
truth of the idea. He also tells us, elsewhere, when hard
pressed by his opponents, that he means by the innate idea
of God only that the soul has the innate faculty of thinking
God, and therefore concludes God is because man thinks
him ; but this is only asserting, in other words, that the soul
lias the faculty of knowing God by immediate cognition —
recently improl)ated by the Holy See — and rests on the
principle that thought can never be erroneous, which is not
true, otherwise evej-y man would be infallible, incapable of
error.

The ontological arguments, so-called, founded on the
alleged immediate cognition of being, are in nearly all cases,
not ontological, but really psychological, as cZas reine Seyn of
Hegel, which is simply an abstraction, therefore worthless;
for the soul has no power in itself alone of immediately ap-
prehending being. The psychological arguments are all in-
conclusive because the}' all assume the point to be proved.
Yet it is not denied that the argument from design, and
others that rest on the principle of cause and effect, as well
as those drawn from the ethical wants and aspirations of the
soul, are all valuable, not indeed in proving that God is, l)ut
in proving what he is. St. Paul tells us that " the invisible
things of God, even his eternal power and divinity, are
clearly seen from the beginning of the world, being under-
stood by the things that are made," Rom. i. 20, but the
Apostle does not tell us that the existence of God is a logi-
cal conclusion from cosniological or psychological facts or
from "the thinjj^s that arc> in;ide." Indeed. St. Thomas cites

40 UEFDTATION OF ATHKISM.

this text to prove what God is, rather than to prove that he
is, for he throughout is replying to the question Quid est
Deus^ rather than to the question. An sit Deus, as maj be
seen by referring to the tirst article of the question cited
above, in which he answers the question, TJtruin Deum esse
■sit per se notum.

The great question the Apostles and the Fathers had to
argue against the Gentiles was not precisely the existence
of God, but that of the Divine Unity and the fact of cre-
ation and providence. In fact, the distinguishing and es-
sential feature of the Mosaic doctrine was less that God is
one than that God is the one Ahnigiity Creator of all things.
The existence of one God, as has been seen, was not denied
by the Gentiles, except by a few philosophers. The mother
error of Gentilism was the loss of the tradition of creation,
which paved the way for- divinizing the forces of nature,
and at length for the worship of demons, always held inferior
to a Supreme Divinity, of Avliich some dim reminiscence
was alwavs retained.

VII. ANALYSIS OF THOUGHT.

Atheism is not natural to mankind, and is always, where-
ever found, the fruit of a false or defective philosophy and
eiToneous theories mistaken for science. The philosophy
which has been generally cultivated since Descartes made
Lis attempt to divorce philosophy from theology, of which
it is simply the rational element, and to erect it into a sepa-
rate and independent science, complete in itself, and embrac-
ing the entire natural order, has hardly recognized and set
forth with much clearness or distinctness the principles of a
conclusive demonstration of theism, or a scientific refutation
of atheism. If there is atheism pretending to found itself
on science, we may charge it to the false philosophy which
has generally obtained, except when connected with Catholic
theology, and kept from going astray by tradition and com-
mon sense. From the philosophers and false scientists
atheism has descended to the people through jiopular liter-
ature, and dilfused itself among tiie half-learned, chiefly by
modern lectures and journalism, till literature, art, science,
ethics, and especially politics, have become infected, and
the very air we breathe saturated with it.

In order to refute atheism and to check the atheistic tend-
ency of modern society, it is necessary to revise the generally

ANALYSIS OF THOUGHT. 41

received philosopliy, to correct its faulty principles and
method, to supply its defects, to harmonize it with common
sense and the traditions of the race, and to establish, what it
is far from doinoj, the identity of the principles of science
and the principles of things, or the identity of the knowable
and the real, that is, to show that the order of science follows
the order of being, and in their principles they are identical.
To do this in a manner as intelligible as possible to the gen-
eral reader, it is necessary to set forth the real principles on
which philosophy is founded. Philosophj^ itself is the
science of principles, and the principles must be real, that
is, the principles of things, not simply mental conceptions
or concepts, or the science will want reality and be no
science at all. Real principles are the principles, not of
science alone, Avithout which nothing can be known, but
principles of things, on which all things depend, and without
which nothing is or exists.

Obviously then the principles of philosophy and of reality
are a 2:>riori^ and precede both the science and the reality
that depends on them, or of which they are the principles.
They must, then, be given, and neither created nor obtained
by the inind's own activity, for without them the mind can
neither operate nor even exist. The great error of the
dominant philosophy of our times is in tlie assumption that
the nn'nd starts without principles, and finds, them or obtains
them by its own activity or its own painful exertions. Hence
it places method before principles, which is no less absurd
than to suppose that the mind, the soul, generates or creates
itself. Principles are given, not found by the mind oper-
ating without principles. They are given in the fact which
we call thought, and we ascertain what they are only by a
diligent and careful analysis of thought.

In order to correct the errors of the prevailing philoso-
phy, to ascertain the principles of a true philosophy, and of
real science that refutes the atheist by demonstratino- that
God is, and is the creator of the heavens and the earth and
all things visible and invisible, we must begin, as Descartes
did, with thought {cog'Uo\ who was so far right, and ascer-
tain what are the real and necessary elements of thought.
This is no light labor, and it is a labor rendered necessary
only by prevailing errors in order to refute them, otherwise
there would be no necessity for it, and little utility in it;
for the human mind remains and operates the same with or
without the knowledge the analysis affords.

42 REFUTATION OF ATHEISM.

We therefore adopt the metliod of the psychologists so
far as to begin with the analysis of thoviglit. This is imposed
on us by the necessity of the case, as it is only in thought
that we find onrselv^es or are placed in intellectual relation
with any thing not ourselves. It is ouly in thouglit that the
principles either of science or reality can be ascertained.
The atheist must assert thought as well as the tlieist, and so
also must the sceptic ; for he who denies or he who doubts,
thinks, and can neither doubt nor deny without thinking.
Hence universal denial or universal doubt, or scepticism, is
simply impossible; for he who denies, or he who doubts,
knows that he denies or doubts, as he who thinks knows that
he thinks. ,' The error of Descartes, or the Psychologues, is
not in beginning with thought, but in their assumption that
all thought is the act of the soul or subject alone, or that
thought is a purely psychological fact.

Cousin, though erring on many capital points, gives some-
where a very clear and just analysis of thouglit, which he
defines to be a complex fact, composed of three inseparable
elements, subject, object, and form. lie asserts that the
subject is always the soul, or ourselves thinking ; the object
is always distinct from the soul, and standing over against
it; and the form is always the relation of the subject and
object. Every thought, therefore, is the synthesis of three
elements : subject, object, and their relation, as we main-
tained and proved in some chapters of an unfinished work
on Synthetic Philosophy published in the years 1842-43.

Thought is either intuitive or reflective. The careful
analysis of intuitive thought, intuition, what Cousin calls
spontaneity or spontaneous thought, though erroneously,
and wjiich he very propei'ly distinguishes from reflection or
thought returning on itself, and so to speak, actively rethink-
ing itself, discloses these three elements : subject, object, and
their relation, always distinct, always inseparable, given
simultaneously in one and the same complex fact. Deny
one or another of these elements and there is and can be no
thought. Remove the subject, and there is no thought, for
there evidently can be no thought where there i,s no thinker ;
remove the object, and there is equally no thought, for to
think nothing is simply not to think; and finally, deny the
relation of subject and object, and you also deny all thought,
for certainly the soul cannot apprehend an object or an object
be presented to the soul with no relation between them ;
hence the assei'tion by the peripatetics of the necessity to

ANALYSIS OF THOUGHT, 43

the fact of intuition as well as of cognition of what they call
phantasmata and species inteUlgibiles^ which is simply their
way of expressing the relation in thought of subject and
object.

The three elements of thought being given simultaneously
and synthetically in one and the same fact, they all three
rest on the same authority and are equally certain both sub-
jectively and objectively. Here we escape the interminable
debates of philosophers as to the passage from the subject-
ive to the objective, and, in military phrase, flank the ques-
tion of the certaiiity of human knowledge, and thus render
all arguments against eitlier subjectivism or scepticism super-
fluous. There is no pass^ige from the subjective to the
objective, if the activity of the subject alone suflices for the
production of thought, and no possible means of a logical
refutation of scepticism. If the soul alone could suffice for
thought, nothing else would be necessary to its production,
and thought would and could afiirm no reality beyond the
soul itself ; no objective reality could ever be proved, and
no real science would be possible. All objective certainty
would vanish, for we have and can have only thought with
which to prove the o1\]ective validity of thought. Hence it
is that those philosophers who regard thought as the product
of the soul's activity alone, have never been able to refute
the sceptic or to get beyond the sphere of the subject.

The soul's activit}^ alone does not, and, unless it were
God, who is the adequate object of his own intellect, could
not, suftiee for thought. Tlie object is as necessary to the
production of thought as is the subject. The soul cannot
act without it, and tlierefore cannot seek and And its object.
The presence and activity of the object is necessary to the
activity of the subject. The object nnist then present itself
or be presented to the soul, or there is no thought actual or
possible. This is the fact which Cousin undertakes to
explain by what he calls spontaneity, and which he distin-
guislies from reflection. Intuition, he says, is spontaneous,
impersonal ; but reflection is personal, in which the soul acts
voluntarily. But unhappily he loses all the advantage of
this distinction, for he makes the intuition the product of
the spontaneous activity of the soul, or, as he says, the spon-
taneous or impersonal reason, therefore as much a psychical
product as reflection itself; and therefore again, gets, even
in intuition, no o])ject, no reality, extra animam^ and with
all his endeavors he never really gets out of the subjectivism

44 REFUTATION OF ATHKISM.

of Kaiit, or even tlie egoism of Fichte, The distinction he
makes between the personal reason and the impersonal is by
no means a distinction between subject and object, but
simply a distinction in the soul itself, or a distinction
between its spontaneous and reflective modes of acting, and
is, as Pierre Leroux has well said, a contradiction of his own
assertion that the subject is always the soul, and the ol)ject
is always distinguishable from it, standing over against it,
and acting from the opposite direction; for the impersonal
and personal reason are in his view psychical, simply a
facnlty of the soul

If the object were purely passive, or did not actively con-
cur in the production of thought, it would be as if it were
not, and the soul could no more think with it than without
it. It is the fact that the object actively concurs in the pro-
duction of thought that establishes its reality, since what is
not, or has no real existence, cannot act, cannot present or
affirm itself. So far Pierre Leroux, to whom we are much
indebted for this analysis of thought, is right, and proves
himself, let Gioberti speak as contemptuously of him as he
will, a true philosophical observer; but he vitiates all that
follows in his philosophy by maintaining that the soul creates
or supplies the form of the thought, or the relation between
subject and object, as we have shown in The Convert. Tlie
soul cannot act without the object, nor unless the object is
placed in relation with it ; consequently the soul can no
more create the relation tdan it can create the object or
itself. The object with the relation, or the correlation of
subject and object, then, is presented to the soul or given it,
not created or furnished by it.

The soul, unable to think by itself alone, or in and of
itself, can think even itself, find itself, or become aware of
its own existence only in conjunction with the object intui-
tively presented ; each of the three elements of thought
therefore not only rests on the same authority, but each is
as certain as is the fact of consciousness or the fact that we
think. The object is affirmed or affii-ms itself objectively,
and is real with all the certainty we have or can have of our
own existence. Further than this, thouo-ht itself cannot go.
we cannot from principles more ultimate than thought, demon-
strate thought ; but it is not necessary, for he who thinks
knows that he thinks, and cannot deny that he thinks with-
out thiukinsT, and therefore not without affirmino: what he

A.NALYSIS OF TnOUGHT. 45

denies. This is all that can be asked, for a denial that
denies itself is equivalent to an affirmation.

This analj'sis of thou^'ht not only refutes scepticism and
subjectivism, or what is called in English philosophy, ideal-
ism, and diows the objective validity of intuition to be as
indisputable as our consciousness of our own existence, but
it refutes at the same time and by the same blow both the
ontologists and psychologists ; not indeed by denying either
the ontological or the psychological principle, but by show-
ing that both are given in one and the same thought, and
therefore that neither is obtained by any process of reason-
ing from the other. The psychologist assumes that the soul
is given, and that it by its own psychical action obtains the
non-psychical or ontological ; the ontologist assumes that
being is given, and from the notion of being alone the soul
deduces both the psychical and the cosnn'c. Neither is the
fact. Being must be intuitively presented or we cannot
have the notion of being, and the intuitive presentation of
being to the subject gives the subject simultaneously the
consciousness of itself as the subject of the intuition.
Being can be presented in thought, only under the relation
of object, and in every thouglit is given simultaneously
with ithe other two inseparable elements, subject and rela-
tion. The psychologist fails in his analysis of thought to
detect as an original and indestructible element of thought a
non-psychical element, the object which stands over agninst
it, distinct from it, and except in conjunction with which
there is and can be no psycliical activity or action. What
the psychologist overlooks is tiie fact that the psychical and
the non-psychical, as the condition of tiie soul's aetivity and
consciousness of itself, are both given together in one and
the same intuitive fact, and tlierefore that neither is obtained
as an element of thought or science from the other. The
objective validity of our knowledge resrs on the non-psychi-
cal element of thought, not on the psychical. The ontolo-
gist fails to detect the psychical element as a primitive ele-
ment of thought; the psychologist fails to detect the onto-
logical element as equally primitive and underived ; and
neither notes the fact that both are given in one and the
same original intuition. Cousin asserts it indeed, but ;is we
have seen, forgets it or destroys its value, by resolving tho
distinction of subject and object into a distinction between
tiie personal and impersonal reason, or between the spon-
taneous and reflective modes of the soul's activity, which

46 REFUTATION OF ATHEISM.

makes both roallj psychical, and allows nothmg extra ani-
mam to be affirmed in thoiic^ht or presented in intuition.

Vin. ANALYSIS OF THE OBJECT.

The analysis of tlionglit, as we have just seen, discloses a
non-psychical or an ontological element, and shows that in
every thoaght there is an object distinct from and independ-
ent of the subject, and thai in every intuitive thought the
object affirms or presents itself by its own activity. This at
one stroke establishes the reality of the object and the valid-
itv of our science or knowledge. Having done this, we may
proceed to analyze, not the subject, as do the psychologists,
but the object, in order to determine, not how we know, but
what we know.

Modern philosopliers, for the most part, especially since
Descartes, proceed to analyze the subject before having
either ascertained or analyzed the object, and are engrossed
with the method and instrument of philosophy before hav-
ing determined its principles. All philosophers do and must
begin with a more or less perfect analysis of thought. Even
Gioberti, who insists on the ontological method, concedes
tliat in learning or teaching philosophy, we must begin with
psychology, the analysis of thought, or as Cousin says, with
the analysis of " the fact of consciousness." But the psy-
chologists proceed immediately from the analysis of thought
to tlie analysis of the subject, that is, of the soul, and give
us simply the philosophy, as it may be called, of the Human
Understanding, as do Locke and Hume ; of the Active
powers of the soul as do Reid and Stewart ; or of the
Iluman Intellect as does Dr. Porter, president of Yale
College. This at best can give us, except by an inconse-
quence, only a science of abstractions, or the subjective forms
of thought without any objective reality, or barely the
Wissenschaftdehre^ or the science of knowing, of Fichte,
the science of the instrument and method of science, not
science itself, the science of empty forms, not the science of
things.

It is no wonder, therefore, that philosophy is very gener-
ally regarded as dealing only with abstractions and empty
formulas, or that it is very generally despissd and rejected
by men of clear insight and strong practical sense, as an
aJjstract science, and therefore worthless. Mere ]osychology,

ANALYSIS OF THE OBJECT. 47

which can be only tlie science of abstractions or empty
forms, is even worse than wortliless, and the popular estimate
of it is only too favorable. There is no class of men more
contemptible or mischievous than psj'choloo'ers endeavoring
to pass themselves oil' for philosophers, and very few others
are to be met with in the heterodox world, or even in the
orthodox world, when not guided and restrained by the
principles and dogmas of Christian theology.

This comes from proceeding to the analysis of the subject
before having analyzed the object. The object, if given
simultaneously with the subject in the fact of thought, pre-
cedes it in the order of being or real order; for it presents
or affirms itself as the necessary condition of the soul's
activity, and of her apprehension of her own existence even.
It is tlrst in order, and its analysis should precede that of the
soul ; for as the subject is given only in conjunction with the
object, or as reflected or mirrored in it, it is only as reflected or
mirrored in the object that it can know or recognize its own
powers or faculties. The object determines the faculty, not
the faculty the object. Man, St. Thomas says, somewhere, as
cited by l>almes, "is not intelligible in himself, because he is
not intelligence in himself" If he could know himself in
liiinself, or be the direct object of his own intellect, he would
be God, at least independent of God. The soul knows itself
only under the relation of subject, as it knows what is not
itself only under the relation of object, and is conscious of
its own existence only in the intuition of the object. We
ascertain the powers of the soul from the object she appre-
hends, not the reality of the object from the powers or
faculties of the soul. The analysis of the object is, then,
the necessary condit'on of the analysis of the subject.

The analysis of the object, like that of thought, if we
mistake not, gives us, or discloses as essential in it, three
elements, the ideal, the empirical, and the relation between
them. The ideal is the a 2yriorl and apodictic element, with-
out which there is and can be no intelligible object, and
consequently no thought; the empirical is the fact of
experience, or the object, wliether appertaining to the sen-
sible order or to the intelligible, as intellectually apprehended
by the soul ; the relation is the nexus of the ideal and the
empirical, and is given by the ideal itself.

Kant has jiroved in his Crltik der rehien Vernunft, or
Analysis of Pure Reason, that the empirical is not possible
without the ideal, or as he says, without cognitions a priori^

48 REFUTA'nON OF ATHEISM.

wliich are necessary to every synthetic judgment, or cognition
a posteriori. The cognitions «j9?'/r?W Kant calls categories
after the peripatetics, or certain forms nnder which we neces-
sarily apprehend all things. lie makes these forms or catego-
ries forms of the human understanding, and therefore makes
them subjective, not objective, or places them on the side of
the subject, not on the side of the object. Aristotle makes
them, apparently, forms neither of the subject nor of the
object, but of t\ie mundus logicus, or a world intermediary
between the subject and the object, or the soul and the
mundus jyhysicus, or real world. Kant's doctrine, that the
categories ai'e forms of the subject, is refuted in our analy-
sis of thought. It implies that the subject can exist and
operate without the object, and that we see the object as we
do, not because it is such as we see it, but because such is the
constitution or law of the human mind, — which denies the
objective validity of our knowledge already established.

The peripatetic categories are admissible or not, as the
intermediary world is or is not taken as the representation of
the real world. If we take the phantasms and intelligible
species as the representations of the object to the mind, not
by the mind, and thus make the categories real, not simply
formal, the peripatetic doctrine, as will be seen further on,
is not inadmissible. But if we distinguish the categories from
tlie inund us pli ijsicus or real world, and make them forms
of an intermediary world, or something which is neither
subject nor object, we deny them all reality, for no such
world does or can exist. AV^hat is neither subject nor object
is nothing. St. Thomas, as we understand him, makes, as we
shall by and by show, the phantasms and species proceed
from tiie object, and holds them to be in the retiective order,
in which the soul is active, representative of the object;
Avhich permits us to hold that in the intuitive order they are
simply prcsentative or the object ])i-esenting or afhi-ming
itself to the passive intellect, lie holds them to be, in scho-
lastic language, ohjeetum, quo not ohjectiim (juod or that in
which the intellect tenninates, but that by which it attains
to the idea, or the intelligible, as will be nn^re fully explained,
further on. The modei'n peripatetics, for the most pai't,
make the categories purely formal, and gravely tell us that a
proposition may be logically time and yet really false!

Cousin identities the categories of Aristotle and Kant,
with what he calls necessary and absolute ideas, and
reduces their number to being and phenomenon, or substance

AJS^ALYSIS OF THE OBJECT. 49

and cause, but loses their objective reality by making them
constituent elements of the impersonal reason, which is sub-
■jective, as purely so as is tlie reflective reason itself.
The impersonal reason differs, in his philosophy, from the
pei-sonal reason only as to the mode of its activity, and is, as
the personal, a faculty of the soul, by wliich the soul knows
all that it does or can know, whatever the degree or region
of its knowledge.

Dr. AVard, of the DuUin Review, places or intends to plac e
the categories or, as he sa^-s, necessarj' and and eternal ideas,
on the side of the object, and liolds that they are intuitive
or self-evident ; yet he makes intuition the act of the soul,
therefore, empirical, and really places the ideal on the side
of the subject. He fails to integrate them in real and neces-
sary being, and says, after Father Kleutgen, that though
founded on God, they are not God. But what is founded
on God, and yet is not God, is creature, and creatures Dr.
Ward cannot hold them to be, for he holds them to be
necessary and eternal, and necessary and eternal creature is
a contradiction in terms. AVhat is neither God nor creature
is nothing, and Dr. AVard cannot say ideas are nothing, for
he holds them to be intuitive or self-evident, and nothing
cannot evidence itself, or be an object of intuition. There
is, also, a further dithculty. Dr. Ward, as do Drs. McCosh
Porter, Hopkins, and others of the same school, by making
intuition an act of the soul makes it a fact of experience,
and the point to be met is, that without intuition of tho
ideal, there is and can be no fact of experience, or empirical
intuition. It must be borne in mind that Kant has proved
that without the cognitions a priori^ or what we call the
ideal, no cognition a posteriori is possible.

Dr. Newman, of whom we would always speak with pro-
found reverence, in his Essay in ai'l of a Grammar of
Assent, appaiently at least, not only denies ideal intuition,
but the objecti'/e reality of the ideal itself, and resolves the
categories or ideas into pure mental abstractions created by
the mind itself. '' All things of the exterior [objective ?]
world," he says, section second of his opening chapter, " are
unit and individual, and nothing else ; but the mind not
only contemplates these unit realities as they exist, but has
the gift, by an act of creation, to bring before it abstrac-
tions and generalizations which have no existence, no coun-
terpart out of it." It would be dithcult to express more
distinctly the Nominalism of Rosceline, or at least the Con
Vou n.— 4

50 EEFUTATION OF ATHEISM.

ceptucalisni of Abelard, censured by the theologians of the
twelfth century as incompatible with the assertion of the
inefiable mystery of the Ever-Blessed Trinity. It need not
surprise us, therefore, that Dr. Xewman confesses in his
Apologia pro Vita sua, that he has never been able by rea-
soning to prove satisfactorily to his own mind the existence
of God, for on his philosophy, if we do not misapprehend
it, he can adduce no argument against the atheist. If we
are to take the passage cited as a key to his philosophy,
there can be for him no object in thought but these unit
realities, for the abstractions and generalizations, being men-
tal creations, are all on the side of the subject, and no place
is left for God in tlie knowable.

But, unhappily, these "unit realities" are not cognizable
by themselves aloiie. To suffice of themselves as objects of
thought they must suffice for their own existence. "What
cannot exist alone, cannot be known alone. Then every
one of these unit realities, to be cognizable alone, must be
an independent, self-existent, and self-sufficing being, that is
to say, God, and there must be as many Gods as there are
unit realities or distinct objects of thought or intuition,
which we need not say is inadmissible. These unit realities
can be objects of thought or intuition only on condition of
presenting or affirming themselves to the mind, and they
can present or affirm themselves in intuition only as they
are i7i r<3, not as they are not, as is sufficiently proved in our
analysis of thought. If they are not real and necessary
being they cannot affirm themselves as such ; if they are
not such they can affirm themselves only as contingent and
dependent existences that have their being in another, not
in themselves, and then only under the relation of contingency
or dependence, or in relation to that on which they depend ;
consequently they are not cognizable without intuition of
real and necessary or independent being which creates them.
Contingency or dependence expresses a relation, but rela-
tions are cogitable only in the related, and only when both
terms of the relation are given. Neither term can be infer-
red from the other, for neither can be thought without the
otlier. Hence there is no intuition of the contingent with-
out intuition of the necessary, or empirical intuition without
ideal intuition.

The categories are all correlatives, and are presented in
two lines, as one and many, the same and the diverse, the
universal and the particular, the infinite and the finite, the

A.NALYSIS OF THE OBJECT. 51

immutable and the mutable, the permanent and the transi-
tory, tlie perfect and the imperfect, the necessary and the
contingent, substance and phenomena, being and existences,
cause and effect, 6ce. These severally connote each other,
and we cannor think the one line without thinking or hav-
ing intuition of the other. When we think a thing as par-
ticular, we distinguish it from the universal, or think it as
not universal ; but evidently we cannot do this unless the
universal is intuitively present to the mind. The same is
equally true of every one of the other categories. The
contingent is not cogitable without intuition of the neces-
sary ; nor is it possible to think the contingent without
intuition of its contingency, for, as we have shown in the
foregoing analysis, the object presents itself by its own
activity, and therefore must present itself as it is, not as it
is not. Notliiug is more certain than that the relation of
the categories is no fact of experience, nor than that neither
correlative is inferred from the other. Yet it is no less cer-
tain tliat men, all men, even very young children, regard
Dr. ISTewman's " Unit realities " as contingent, as dej)endent,
or as not having the cause of their existence in themselves.
Hence the questions of the child to its mother : " Who made
the flowers 'i who made the trees ? who made the birds ? who
made the stars? who made father? who made God?"
Hence, too, those anxious questionings of the soul tliat we
mark in the ancient heathen and in the modei*n Protestant
world : Whence came we ? why are we here ? whither do
we go? It is only scientists, Comtists or Cosmists, who are
satisfied with Topsy's theory, "I didn't come, I grow'd."
But if tlie soul had no intuition of the relation of contingent
and necessary, or of cause and effect, it would and could
ask no such questions.

It is certain, as a matter of 'fact, that the soul has present
to it both the contingent and necessary, as the condition
a priori of all experience or empirical intuition. So much
Kant has proved. The object of thought always presents
itself either as contingent or as necessary. The categories
•of necessity and contingency, not being empirical, since they
are the forms under wliich we necessarily apprehend every
object we do appreliend, we call them ideas, or the ideal.
The question to be settled is. Is the ideal, without wliich no
fact of experience is possible, on the side of the object, or
-on the side of the subject ? Kant places it on the side of
the subject, and subjects the object to the laws of the soul ;

52 REFUTATION OF ATHEISM.

we place it on the side of the object, and hold that it is that
withont which the object is not intelligible, and therefore
no object at all. Hence we maintain that the object of
thought is not a simple nnit, but consists of three inseparable
elements, the ideal, the empirical, and their relation. The
proof that we are riglit is furnished in onr analysis of
thought, and rests on the principle that what is not is not
intelligible, and that no object is intelligible save as it really
exists. This follows necessarily from the fact we have
established that the object presents or affirtns itself by its
own activity. Contingent existences are active only in their
relation to the necessary ; consequently are intelligible or
cognizable only in their relation of contingency. Then, as
certain as it is that we think, so certain is it that the ideal is
on the side of the object, not on the side of the subject.
This will appear still more evident wlien we recollect that
the contingent is not apprehensible without the intuition of
the necessary on which it depends, and the necessary is and
can be no predicate of the subject, which is contingent exist-
ence, not necessary being, since it depends on the object for
its power to act.

It follows from this that the ideal is given intuitively in
every thought, as an essential, element of the object, and
therefore that it is objective and real. But while this
agrees with Plato in asserting the objective reality of the
ideal, in opposition to Kant, it agrees also with Aristotle
and St. Tliomas in denying tliat it is given separately. We
assert the ideal as a necessary elen]ent of the object, but we
deny that, separated from tlie empirical element, it is or can
be an object of thought; for man in this life is not pure
spirit or soul, but spirit or soul united to body, and cannot
directly perceive, as maintained, by Plato, the 'old Gnostics
or PrieainaticU the modern Transcendental ists, Pierre
Leroux, and the disciples of the English School founded by
the opium-eater Coleridge, such as Drs. McCosli and Ward,
Presidents Marsh, Porter, and Hopkins, to mention no
others. Hence we deny the proposition of the Louvain
professoi'S, improbated by the Holy See, that the mind " has
immediate cognition, at least habitual, of God." Cognition
or perception is an act of the soul in concurrence with the
object, and the soul, though the forma corporis, or inform-
ing principle of the body,"never in tiiis life acts without the
body, and consequently can perceive the ideal only as sen-
sibly represented. The ideal is really given in intuition^

ANALYSIS OF THE OBJECT. 53

but not by itself alone ; it is given in the empirical fact as
its a priori condition, and is distinctly held only as sepa-
rated from it, by reflection, the intellectus agens, or active
intellect, as maintained by St. Thomas and the whole peri-
patetic school, as well as by the official teaching in our
Catholic schools and colleges generally.

Ideal intuition is not perception or cognition. Per-
ception is empirical, whether mediate or immediate, and
whatever its object or its sphere, and in it the soul is always
.the percipient agent. Intuition of the ideal is solely the act
of the object, and in relation to it the intellect is passive.
It corresponds to the intelligible species of the peripatetics,
or rather to what they call species impressa. Dr. Reid,
founder of the Scottish school, finished by Sir William
Hamilton, thought he did a great thing when he vehemently
attacked, and as he flattered himself made away "svith, the
phantasms and intelligible species of the peripatetics, which
he supposed were held to be certain ideas or immaterial
images interposed between the mind and the real object,
and when he asserted that we perceive things themselves,
not their ideas or images. But Dr. Reid mistook a wind-
mill for a giant. The peripatetics never held, as he supposed,
iuiXQi p>hanias7ricda and the species inteUigihiles to be either
ideas or images, nor denied the doctrine of the Scottish
school, that we perceive things themselves ; and one is a
little surprised to find so able and so learned a philosopher
as Gioberti virtually conceding that they did, and giving
Reid and Sir William Hamilton credit for establishing the
fact that we perceive directly and immediately external
things themselves. We ourselves have studied the peripa-
tetic school chiefly in the writings of St. Thomas, the great-
est of the Schoolmen, and we accept the doctrine of sensible
and intelligible species as he repi'esents them, that is, sup-
posing we ourselves understand him. Both the sensible
and the intelligible species proceed from the object, and in
relation to them the intellect is passive, that is, simply in
potentia ad actum. Now, as we have shown that the intel-
lect cannot act prior to the presentation of the object or till
the object is placed in relation with it, it cannot then, either
in the sensible or the intelligible order, place itself in relation
with the object, but the object, by an objective act inde-
pendent of the intellect, must place itself in relation with
the subject. This is the fact that underlies the doctrine of
the peripatetic phantasms and intelligible species, and trans-

r4 "REFUTATION OF ATHEISM.

lated into modern tliouglit means all simply what we call
ideal intuition, or the presentation or affirmation of the
object by itseK or its placing itself by its own act in relation
to the intellect as the a priori condition of perception.

But as the soul cannot act without the body, the intelligi-
ble cannot be presented save as sensibly represented, and
therefore only in the phantasmata or sensible species, from
which the active intellect abstracts, divides, disengages, or
separates — not infers — them. Yet the intelligible, the ideal,
as we say, is really presented, and is the object in which the
intellect terminates or which it attains, the very doctrine we
are endeavoring by our analysis of the object to bring out.
Reid never understood it, and psychologists either do not
distinguish the ideal from the empirical, or profess to infer
it by way of deduction or induction from the sensible.. St.
Thomas does neither, for he holds that the intelligible enters
the mind with or in the sensible, and is simply disengaged,
not concluded, from it.

It is necessary to be on our guard against confounding the
question of the reality of the ideal or universal and necessary
ideas, which correspond to the cognitions a priori of Kant,
with the scholastic question as to the reality of universals,
as do the Louvain professors, in the proposition improbated
by the Holy See, that universals, a 'parte rei considerata,
are indistinguishable from God, wliich confounds universale
with idea exemj)laris, or the type in the divine mind after
which God creates, and which St. Thomas says is nothing
else than the essence of God. Idea in Deo nihil est aliud
quam essentia Dei. The universals of the Schoolmen are
di^^sible into classes: 1, Whiteness, roundness, and the like,
to which some think Plato gave reality, as he did to justice,
the beautiful, &c., and which are manifestly abstractions,
with no reality save in their concretes from which the mind
abstracts them; 3, Genera and species, as hmnanitas. The
Scholastics, as far as our study of them goes, do not sharply
distinguish between these two classes, but treat them both
under the general head of universals.

Rosceline and the xS^ominalists, who fell under ecclesiasti-
cal censure, held universals to be simply general terms, or
empty words; Abelard and the Conceptualists held tliem to
be not empty words, but mental conceptions existing in the
mind but with no existence a parte rei; Guillaume de
Champeaux of St. Victor, and afterwards bishop of Paris, and
the mediseval Realists, are said to have held them to be real or

ANALYSIS OF THE OBJECT. 55

to exist a parte rei, or as they said then, as separate entities ;
St. Thomas and the Thomists, as is well known, held them
to exist ill ■mente or in conceptu otim fundamento in re.
But Cousin, in his PhilosopMe Scholastique, originally pub-
lished as a Report to the French Academy on tlie unpub-
lished works of Abelard, thinks, not without reason, that he
finds in a passage cited by Abelard from William de Cham-
peaux, that the medifeval realists did not assert the separate
entity of all universals, but only the reality of genera and
species, though of course, not either as ideas in the divine
mind, or as existing apart from their individualization.

The reahty of genera and species is very plainly taught in
Genesis, for it is there asserted that God created all living
creatures each after its kind ; and if we were to deny it,
generation as the production of like by like could not be
asserted ; the dogma of Original Sin, or that all men or the
race sinned in Adam, would be something more than an
inexplicable mystery, and we have observed that those theo-
logians who deny the reality of the species, iiave a strong
tendency to deny original sin, or to explain it away so as to
make it not sin, but the j^unishment of sin. Certainly, if
the race were not one and I'eal in Adam, it would be some-
what difficult to explain how original sin could be propa-
gated by natural generation. It would be equally difficult
to explain the mystery of Redemption through the assump-
tion of human nature by the Word, unless we suppose, what
is not admissible, that the Word assumed each individual
man, for to suppose a real human nature common to all men,
is to assert the reality of the genus or species. The denial
of the reality of genera and species not only denies the unity
of the race and thus denies Original Sin, the Incarnation,
Redemption, and Regeneration, l)ut also impugns, it seems
to us, tlie Mystery of the Blessed Trinity, by denying the
unity of the nature or- essence of the three persons of the
Godhead, and certain it is that both Roscehne and Abelard
were accused of denying or misrepresenting that ineffable
Mystery.

We are not aware of the views of St. Thomas on this pre-
cise question, or that he has treated specially of the question
of genera and species. As to the other class of universals,
he is unquestionably right. They are conceptions, existing
m mente cum fundamento in re, that is, mental abstractions,
formed hy the mind operating on the concretes given in
intuition. They have their foundation in reality. There

56 KEFUTATION OF ATHEISM.

is a basis of reality in all our mental conceptions, even in our
wildest imaginations and our most whimsical fancies, for we
neither think nor imagine what is absolutely unreal.

But however this may be, St. Thomas* does not class what
we call the ideal intuitively given, with the universals or
conceptions, with simply a basis in reality. He asserts self-
evident principles, the first principles of science or of demon-
stration, which are neither formed by the mind, nor obtained
from experience, but precede experience and all reasoning,
and which must be given by ideal intuition. In its sub-
stance, its principles and method, the real philosopher will
find that the philosophy of St. Thomas cannot be safely
rejected, although, as we have already intimated, he may
find it necessary, in order to meet errors which have arisen
since his time, to explain some questions more fully than St.
Thomas has done and to prove some points which he could
take for granted.

IX. ANALYSTS OF THE IDEAL.

The analysis of Thought gives us three inseparable ele-
ments, all equally real : subject, object, and their relation ;
the analysis of the Object gives us also three inse])arable ele-
ments, all objectively real, namely, the ideal, the empirical,
and their relation. The analysis of the Ideal, we shall see,
gives us again three inseparable elements, all also objectively
real, namely, the necessary, the contingent, and their rela-
tion, or being, -existences, and the relation between them.

We have found what logicians call the categories and what
we call the ideal or objective ideas, and without which no
thought or fact of experience, as Kant has proved, is possible,
are identical. Aristotle makes the categories ten and two
predicaments; Kant makes them fifteen, two of the sensi-
bility, twelve of the understanding ( Verstand), and one of
the reason, {Vernunft) ; but whatever their number, they
are, contrary to Kant, intuitive, and therefore objectively
real. They are intuitive because they are the necessary con-
ditions a priori of experience or the souPs intellectual
action ; and they are objective, since otherwise the}' could
not be intuitive, for intuition is the act of the object, not of
the subject.

* See Sinnma, p. 1, Q. 3, a. 1.

ANALYSIS OF THE IDEAL, 57

All philosophers agree that whatever exists is arranged
under some one or all of these categories, and is either neces-
sary or contingent, independent or dependent, one or many,
tiie same or the diverse, universal or particular, invariahle or
variable, immutable or mutable, permanent or transitory,
infinite or finite, eternal or temporary, being or existences,
«ause or effect, creator or creature. They are, as we have
seen, in two lines, and go, so to speak, in pairs, and are cor-
relatives, and each connotes the other.

But these categories may be reduced to a smaller num-
ber. Cousin contends that all tlie categories of the upper
line may be reduced to the single category of being, and
those of the lower line to the single category of phenome-
non, or the two lines to substance and cause. Rosmini
reduces the categories of the upper line to being in general ;
Eather Eothenflue reduces them all to the single category
of ens reale, or real being, in contradistinction from the ens
in genere of Rosmini ; tiie Lou vain professors, as all exclu-
sive ontologists, do the same. The exclusive psj^cliologists
reduce them all to the category of the soul or our personal
existence ; Gioberti reduces the categories of the upper line
to that of real and necessary being, ens necessarmm et reale^
and all the categories of the lower line to that of contin-
gent existences, or briefly, both lines to Being and Exist-
ences.

Cousin's reduction is inadmissible, for it omits the second
line, or denies its reality. Phenomenon, in so far as real or
any thing, is identical with being, and does not constitute a
distinct category. Cousin makes being and substance iden-
tical, a pantheistic error ; for thougli all being is substance,
all substances are not real and necessary being. He also
places cause in the lower line, which is a mistake. The
effect is in the second line, but not the cause. It is true,
cause is not in the upper line, for it is not eternal and neces-
sary. The causative power is in being, and therefore in the
upper line, but actual cause is the nexus between the two
lines, and is included in the relation between them, or
between the necessary and the contingent. This shows that
the ideal or the categories cannot be reduced to two, for that
would deny all relation between them, and make them sub-
ject and predicate without the copula. Gioberti is more
philosophical in reducing them to three, in his terminology,
Being, existences, and their relation.

Cousin, Father Rothenflue, Professor Ubaghs, and all the

58 REFUTATION OF ATHEISM.

ontologists, as we shall soon show, are right in their reduc-
tion of the categories of the upper line to the single category
of real and necessary being, though Cousin and Spinoza, as
do all pantheists, err in making being and substance identi-
cal, and in asserting one only substance, as do the Cosmists,
for this restricts the ideal to the upper line, and excludes
entirely the lower line. Hence they resolve all reality into
being, or substance and phenomenon, the last real only in
being or substance.

Real and necessary being is independent, and can sMnd
alone, but we found in our analysis of the object, another
line of categories, the contingent, the particular, the depend-
ent, &G., equally necessary as the a ])^'iori condition of
experience or empirical intuition, and therefore included in
the ideal element of the object, and therefore given or pre-
sented in ideal intuition. The relation between the two
lines of categories, and which is really the relation, not yet
considered, between the ideal and the empirical, and also
given by ideal intuition, will be treated further on. Here we
are considering only the two lines of categories, given together
in ideal intuition. For the present we shall consider them
simply as reduced to two categories, namely, the necessary and
the contingent, which will soon appear to be necessary being
and contingent existences. These categories are, as included
either in the ideal or in the object of thought, correlatives,
and neither can be inferred or concluded from the other.
They do not imply one the other, but each connotes [ponnotai]
the other, that is to say, neither is cognizable ^\dthout the
other. They who take the necessary as their principium
can conclude from it only the necessary, not the contin-
gent, and hence the pure ontologists, who attempt by logi-
cal deduction from real and necessary being alone to
obtain the contingent, inevitaWy fall into pantheism. It
is equally impossible to conclude, by logical induction, real
and necessary being from the contingent. Deduction from
the contingent can give only the contingent, and induction
can give only a generalization, which remains always in the
order of the particulars generalized. Hence those who make
the contingent their principium, if consequent, inevitably
fall into atheism. The error of each class arises from their
incomplete analysis of the object and of its ideal element.
The complete analysis of the object sliows, as we have seen,
that the ideal element is given intuitively, as the a pr^iori
condition of the empirical. The analysis of the ideal shows

ANALYSIS OF THE IDEAL. 59

that the necessary and the contingent are both given in the
ideal intuition and there is no need of attempting to con-
clude either from the other. They are both primitive, and
being intuitively given, both are and must be objectively
real.

But the necessary and the contingent are abstract terms,
and are real only in their concretes. There is and can be
no intuition of necessary and contingent as abstractions ; for
as abstractions they have no objective existence, and there-
fore are incapable of presenting or affirming themselves in
intuition, whicli, as we have shown, is the act of the object,
not of the subject. The necessary must therefore, since we
have proved it ]-eal, be real and necessary being, and intu-
ition of it is intuition of real and necessary being. In like
manner, intuition of the contingent is not intuition of con-
tingent nothing, but of contingent being, that is, exist-
ences, the ens secundum quid of the Schoolmen. This is
what we have proved in proving the reality of the ideal.
Ideas without which no fact of knowledge is possible, and
which through objective intuition enter into all our mental
operations, are not, as they are too often called, abstract
ideas, but real.

We have reduced, provisorily, the ideas or categories to
two, necessary and contingent, whicli we find, in tlie fact
that they are intuitively given, are real, and if real, then the
necessary is real and necessary being, and the contingent is
contingent, though real, existence. Then the analysis of the
ideal or a priori element of human knowledge gives us
being, existences, and their relation. These three terms are
really given intuitively, but, as we have seen, in the fact of
thought or experience, they are given as an inseparable ele-
ment of the object, not as distinct or separate objects of
thought, or of empirical apprehension, noetic or sensible.^
They are given in the empirical fact, though its a priori
element, and the mind by its own intuitive action does not
distinguish them from the empirical element of the object,
or perceive them as distinct and separate objects of thought.
We distinguish tliem only by reflection, or by the analysis
of the object, which is complex, distinguishing what in the
object is ideal and a priori from what is empirical and a
posteriori. When we assert the necessary and contingent as
ideas, the mind, again, does not perceive that the one is
being and the other existence or dependent on being ; the
mind perceives this only in reflecting that if given they must

€0 REFUTATION OF ATHEISM.

be objective and real, and if real, being and existence, for
what is not being, or by or from being, is not real. The
identity of the ideal and the real, and of the real with being
and what is from being, is arrived at by reflection, and is, if
you insist on it, a conclusion, but, as the logicians say, an
explicative, not an illative conclusion.

But we have reduced the categories to the necessary and
contingent, and found the necessary identical with real and
necessary being, ens necessarium et reale, and the contingent
identical with contingent existence, ens secundum quid.
Being is independent, and can stand alone, and can be
asserted without asserting any thing beside itself ; for who
says hehig says being is — a fact misconceived by Sir William
Hamilton, when he denies that the unconditioned can be
thought, because thought itself conditions it. But a contin-
gent existence cannot be thought by itself alone, for contin-
gency asserts a relation, and can be thought or asserted only
under that relation. It would be a contradiction in terms
to assert ideal intuition of the contingent as independent,
self -existent, for it would not then be contingent. The con-
tingent, as the term itself implies, has not the cause or
source of its existence in itself, but is dependent on being.
The relation between the two categories is the relation of
dependence of the contingent on the necessary, or of contin-
gent existences on real and necessary being. This relation
we express by the word existences. The ex in the word
existence implies relation, and that the existence is derived
from being, and, though distinguished from it, depends on
it, or has its being in it, and not in itself.

The Scholastics apply the word ens^ being, alike to real
and necessaiy being and to contingent existences, to what-
ever is real, and also to whatever is unreal, or a mere figment
of the in)agiuation, as when they say ens rationis. This
comes partly from the fact that the Latin language, as we find
it in the Latin classics, is not rich in philosophic terms, but
still more from the fact that they treat philosophy chiefly
from the point of ^aew of reflection, which is secondary, and
is the action of the mind on its intuitions. AVhatevercanbe
the object of reflective thought, though the merest abstraction
or the purest fiction, they call by the common name of ens :
it may be ens reale or ens possihile, ens necessarium or ens
contingens^ ens simpliciter or ens secundum qxdd. From the
Schoolmen the practice has passed into all modern languages.
We think it would be more simple and convenient, and tend

ANALYSIS OF THE IDEAL. 61

to avoid confusion, to restrict as Gioberti does, being to the
ens simpliciter of the Schoolmen, and to use the word exist-
ence, or rather existences, to avoid all ambiguity, to express
whatever is from being and depends on it, and yet is dis-
tinguishable from it.

Making this change in the received terminology of philos-
ophy, the analysis of the ideal gives us being, Existences,
and the relation between them. The second term, as the
lower line in the categories, must be given in the ideal
intuition, for we cannot perceive existences, or empirically
appreliend contingents, unless we have present to our mind
the i<iea of contingency as the correlative of the necessary,
as shown in our analysis of the object.

There remains now to be considered the third term, or the
relation of the contingent to the necessary, or of existences
to Being. Being and existences comprise all that is or exists.
What is not real and necessary, self-existent and independent
being, is eitlier nothing or it is from being and dependent
on being. Existences are, as we have seen, distinguished
from being, and j'et are real, for the idea of contingency is
given in the objective intuition, or in the ideal element of
the object. Existences are then real, not nothing, and yet
are not being. Nevertheless they are, as we have seen,
related to being and dependent on it. But they cannot l)e
distinct from being, and yet dependent on l)eing, uidess pro-
duced from nothing b}' the creative act of being. JiJeing
alone is eternal, self-existent, and beside being there is and
can be only existences created by being. Being nnist either
create them from nothing by the sole enei-gy of its will, or
it must evolve them from itself. Not the last, for that
would deny that they are distinct from being; tlien the first
must be accepted as the only alternative. Hence the iinaly-
sis of the ideal gives us being, existences, and the creative
act of being as the nexus or copula that unites existences to
being, or the predicate to the subject.

The ideal then lias, as Gioberti truly remarks, the three
terms of a complete judgment, subject, predicate, and
copuhi, and as it is formed by the ideal, it is real, objective,
formed and presented to us by being itself, presented nut
separately, but as the ideal element of the object. It con-
tains a foi-mula that excludes alike ontologism and psycholo-
gism, and gives the principium of each in its real synthesi--^.
The intelligent reader will see, also, we trust, that it excludes
alike the exaggerations of both spiritualists and sensists, and

62 REFUTATION OF ATHEISM.

that nothing is more ridiculous than to charge it, as we
iiave set it forth, with atheism or pantheism, as many excellent
persons have done, as thej find it stated in the pages of
Gioberti. It refutes, as we trust we shall soon see, both
atheism and pantheism, and establishes Christian theism.
Truth, if truth, is truth, let who will tell it, and it is as law-
ful to accept it when told bv Gioberti as when told by Plato,
Aristotle, Kant, Cousin, Pierre Leroux, or Sir William
Hamilton.

X. ANALYSIS OF THE RELATION.

In the analysis of thought, the analysis of the object, and
the analysis of the ideal we have found in each, three ele-
ments given simultaneously and inseparably. In thought :
subject, object, and their relation ; in the object : the ideal,
the empirical, and their relation ; in the ideal : the necessary
or being, the contingent or existences, and their relation.
But though in the last analysis we have stated the relation is
the creative act, the reader will not fail to perceive that we
have given only a meagre account of the relation in the
analysis of thought, and still less in the analysis of the object.
This has been partly because we are not setting forth a
coD:iplete system of philosophy embracing all the questions
of rational science, and partly because till we had reached the
analysis of the ideal, the analysis, or a proper account of the
relation in the other two cases, could not be given, since the
relation, as we hope to show, is substantially one and the same
in each of the three cases.

The analysis of the relation is not practicable in the sense
of the other analyses we have made ; for, as relation, it has
only a single term, and prescinded from the related is
simply nullity. We can analyze it only in the related, in
which alone it is real. In the fact of thought we have found
that the object is active, not passive as most philosophies
teach ; and therefore that it is the object that renders the
subject active, reduces it to act, and therefore creates it. St.
Thomas and, we believe, all the Scholastics, teach that in
the reception of the phantasms and the intelligible species
the mind is passive. That which is purely passive is as if it
were not, for whatever really is or exists, is or exists in actu,
and therefore is necessarily active. Since, then, the phan-

AJ^AI^YSIS OF THE RELATION. 63

tasms and species proceed from the object,* it follows that
the object actualizes the subject, and renders it active or
intellectus agens. Hence the relation of object and subject in
the fact of thought is the relation of cause and effect. The
object actualizes or creates the subject, not the subject the
object.

The relation we have found of the ideal and empirical is
also the relation of cause and effect. The empirical we
have found is impossible without the ideal, for it depends
on it, and does not and cannot exist without it. That with-
out which a thing does not and cannot exist, and on which
it depends, is its cause. The ideal then causes, produces, or
creates the empirical, and therefore the relation between
them is the relation of cause and effect. Ideal space pro-
duces empirical space, and ideal time produces empirical
time. As the ideal is real and necessary being, ens neces-
sarium et reale^ as we have seen, ideal space is and can be
only the power of being to externize its own acts, in the
order of coexistences, and ideal time can only be the power
of being to externize its own acts successively, or pro-
gressively. Empirical space is the effect of the exercise of
this power producing the relation of coexistence ; empirical
time is its effect in producing the relation of succession, oi'
progressive actualization. The relations of space and time
are therefore resolvable into the relation of cause and effect,
the reverse of what is maintained by Hume and our modern
scientists.

As all the categories of the upper line are integrated in
real and necessary ])eing, and as all the categories of the lower
line are integrated in existences, so all relations must be
integrated in the relation of being and existences, which is
the act of being, producing, or actualizing existences, and
therefore the relation of cause and effect. Hence there are

* We think it a capital mistake of some moderns to suppose, as does
the very able and learned Father Dalgairns in his admirable treatise on
Hol}^ Communion, that the Scholastics held that the phantasms and spe-
cies by which the mind seizes the object are furnished by the mind
itself. " This would make the Scholastic philosophy a pure psychologism,
which it certainly is not, though it becomes so in the hands of many who
prof('ss to follow it. St. Thomas expressly makes the mind passive in
their reception, and then-fore must hold that they are furnished by the
object, and consequently that in them or by means of them the object
presents itself to the mind and actualizes it, or constitutes it intellectua
ageris. There are more who swear by St. Thomas than understand him,
and not a few call themselves Thomists who are really Cartesians.

64 REFUTATION OF ATHEISM.

and can be no passive relations, or relations of passivity.
Whatever is or exists is active, and God, who is being in its
plenitude and infinity, is, as say the theologians, actus puris-
siinus^ most pure act. Only the active is or exists; the
passive is non-existent, is nothing, and can be the subject of
no predicate or relation. So virtually reasons St. Thomas in
refuting tlie Gentile doctrine of a materia prima or first
matter. Aristotle held that matter eternally exists, and that
all things consist of this eternally existing matter and form
given it by the equally eternally existing Mind or Intelli-
gence. St. Thomas modifies this doctrine, and teaches that
the reality of things, or the real thing itself, is in the form,
or idea as Plato says, and consequently is not a form
impressed on a preexisting matter, but a creation from
nothing; for matter without form, he maintains, is merely
in p)oteiitia ad formam, therefore passive, therefore mere
possibilit}', and therefore, prescinded from the creative act,
simply non-existent, a ])ure nullity, or nothing. Even Ilegel
asserts as much when he makes das reine Se(/?i the equiva-
lent of das Nicht-Seyn. To give activity to the passive, to
give form to the possible, or to create from nothing, says one
and the same thing.

St. Thomas teaches, as we have seen, that the mind in the
reception of the phantasms and species is passive, and there-
fore must hold, if consistent with himself, that prior to the
afiirmation of the object through them the mind does not
actually exist ; consequently that the afiirmation or pi-esenta-
tion of the object creates the mind, or the intellectual or
intelligent subject, which, again, proves that the relation of
subject and object is the i-elation of cause and eft'ect. If
then we accept the doctrine of St. Thomas, otherwise undeni-
able, that the passive and the possible are identical, we must
deny — since the possible is non-existent, a pure abstraction,
and therefore, simply nothing — that there ai'e or can be any
passive relations, and hold that in all relations, ideal or
empirical, the one term of the relation is the cause of the
other. This is why one term of the relation cannot be
knowTi without intuition of the pther, or why, as we say,
correlatives connote one another.

Here, too, we may see yet more clearly than we have
already seen, the error of Sir William Hamilton in asserting
that correlatives are reciprocal, and the still more glaring
error of Cousin in asserting the same thing of cause and
efliect. Correlatives connote each other, it is true ; but not

ANALYSIS OF THE RELATION. 65

as reciprocal, for in tl^e intuition tliey are affirmed, and in
cognition connoted, the one as creating or producing the
other, and it would be absurd to assert that tlie effect creates
the cause, or that cause and effect produce reciprocally each
the other. Sir AVilHam Hamilton is misled by his failure to
comprehend that all relations are integrated in tlie relation
of being and existences, and are therefore relations of cause
and effect, or of the productive or creative power of being
producing existences. He, as does Hume, excludes the
notion or conception of power, and therefore not only the
creative act of being, but of all activity, and conceives all
relations as passive. They are all resolvable into relations
of coexistence and succession, or relations of space and time,
and tlierefore relations of the passive ; for excluding ontol-
ogy from the region of science, or the cogitable, Sir W,
Hamilton can assert no creative or productive power, and
recognize no relation of real cause and effect.

JN^eithcr Cousin nor Sir William Hamilton ever under-
stood that tlie object affirmed in thought, and without which
there is and can be no thought, actualizes, that is, places or
creates the subject, and rendei's it thinking or cognitive sub-
ject. The object does not simply furnish the occasion or
necessary condition to the subject for the exercise of a
power or faculty it already possesses, but creates the mind
itself, and gives it its faculty, as we have already proved in
proving that in ideal intuition the soul is passive, that is —
as St. Thomas implies in resolving the passive into the pos-
sible— non-existent, and therefore the subject of no relation
or predicate. The ideal or intuitive object must then be
real and necessary being, for the contingent is not creative,
and hence the intuition of being, which Sir William Ham-
ilton denies, is not only necessary to the eliciting of this or
that particular thought, but to the veiy existence of the
soul as intelligent subject, and therefore must be a persistent
fact, as will be more fully explained in the section on Exist-
ences.

It follows from this that the relation of subject and object,
or rather of object and subject, in eveiw thought is the rela-
tion, as we have said, of cause and effect. It is the third
term or copula in the ideal judgment, and is in every judg-
ment, whether ideal or empirical, that which makes it a
judgment or affirmation. Being, Gioberti says, contains a
complete judgment in itself, for it is equivalent to heinfj is j
but this is nothing to our present purpose. Being and exist-
voL. n.— 5

66 - KEFUTATIOiSr OF ATHEISM.

.eiiccs as subject and predicate constitute no jnd,o:ment with-
out the copula that joins the predicate to the subject. As
the cojMila can proceed only from being, or the sul>ject of
the predicate, as its act, the ideal judgment is necessarily
Ens createxistentias ; and, as the object creates or produces
the predicate, the judgment in its three terms is Divine and
apodictic, the necessary and apodictic ground of every
liuman or empirical judgment, without intuition of which
the human mind can neither judge nor exist.

It is not pretended of course that all judgments are ideal,
any more than it is that every cause is tirst cause. There
are second causes, and consequently second or secondary,
that IS, empirical judo-ments. Tlip second cause depends on
the first cause wliich is the cause of all causes ; so the empi-
rical judgment depends on the ideal or Divine judgment
•which it copies or imitates, as the second cause always copies
or imitates in its own manner and degree the first cause.
There is no judgment — and every thought is a judgment —
M-ithou.t the creative act of being creating the mind and fur-
nishing it the light by M'hich it sees and knows ; yet, the
iiinucdinte relation in empirical judgments, that is, judg-
ments which the soul herself forms, though a relation of
cause and effect, is not the relation between being and exist-
ences, as we once thought, though perhnp, erroneously, that
Gioherti maintained, and which were sheer pantheism, inas-
nnich as it would deny the existence of second causes, and
make God the sole and universal actor. The relation in the
ideal judgirient is on\y eminentlij the cause in the empirical
judgment, in the sense in which being is the eminent cause
of all actions, in that it is the cause of all causes.

Tlie co]">ula or relation in the ideal judgment is the creative
act of being, or suhject creating the predicate, as we shall soon
prove, and uniting it to itself. This is true of all relations.
The first term of the relation of subject and predicate, is the
cause of the second term, and by its own causative act unites
the predicate to itself as its subject. Second causes have, in
relation to the first cause, the I'elation of dependence, arc
])roduced by it, are its effects or jiredicates ; but in relation to
their own ctrects, they are efficient causes, and represent
creative i>eing. "We are existences and wholly dependent
on real and necessary being, for our existence and our pow-
ers are sim])iy the clfect of the divine creative act or activity;
but in relation to our own actr n'o are cause; we are the
subject, they are the i)redicat( , and our act producing them

ANALYSIS OF THE KELATION. 67

is the copula. In this sense tlie second canse copies the first
cause, and the empirical judgment copies the ideal or, as we
have called it, the Divine judgment.

We saj this not by way of proof that the relation between
being and existence is tlie creative act of being, which fol-
lows necessarily from the reduction of the categories to being,
existences, and their relation, or subject, predicate, and
copula, for the copula can be nothing else than the creative
act of being ; but to prevent the mistake of supposing tliat
being is the agent that acts in our acts, and that our acts are
predicates of the Divine activity ; which is the mistake into
which the Duke of Argyll falls in his "Reign of Law," and
of all who impugn Free Will, and deny tlie reality of second
causes. Plaving done this, and having resolved the relation
of being and existences, and all relations into the relation of
cause and effect, we may now proceed to consider the Fact
of Creation.

XI. — THE FACT OF CREATION.

The great Gentile apostasy from the Patriarchial religion
originated in the loss of the primitive tradition of the fact
of creation : that in the beginning God created the heaVens
and tlie earth, and all things-visible and invisible. No Gen-
tile philosophy, known to us, recognizes the fact of creation ;
and the mother-error of all Gentilism is pantheism, and
pantheism is no vulgar error, originating with the ignorant
and unlettered many, but the error of the cultivated few,
philosophers and scientists, who, by their refinements and
subtile speculations on the relation of cause and effect, first
obscure in their own minds and then wholly obhterate from
them the fact of creation.

Dr. Dollinger, in his Ueaihenhm, hefore ChristianiPj,
assumes that heathenism originated with the ignorant and
vulgar, not w^ith the learned and scientific. But this view
cannot be accepted by any one who has watched the course
of philosophy and the sciences for the last three centuries.
Three centuries ago Christian theism was held universally
by all ranks and conditions of civilized society, and atheism
was regarded with hoi'ror, and hardly dared show its head ;
now, the most esteemed, the most distinguished philosophers
and scientists, like Emerson, llerl)ert Spencer, Professor
IJuxley, Emile Littre, Claude liernard, Voigt, Eachmann,

68 REFUTATION OF ATHEISM.

Sir John Lnb])ock, and Professor Tjndall, to mention no
otliers, are decided pantheists, and nndisgnised atlieists.
They are not merely tolerated, but are held to be the great
men and shining lights of the age. Pantheism — atheism — •
in onr times originates with philosophers and scientists and
descends to the people, and, in the absence of all proof to
the contrary, it is fair to presume that it was the same in
ancient times. The corruption, alike of language and of
doctrine, is always the work of philosophers and of the
learned or the lialf-learned, never of the people.

The various heathen mythologies never originated, and
never could have originated, with the ignorant multitude, or
with savage and bai-barous tribes. These mythologies are in
great part taken up with the generation or genealogy of the
gods, and bear internal evidence that they had for their
starting point the ineffable mystery of the Blessed Ti-inity,
and have grown out of effoj-ts by philosophers and theolo-
gians to symbolize the eternal generation of the Son, and the
procession of the Holy Ghost, which they obscured and lost
by their inappropriate symbols, figures, and allegories. They
all treat the universe as generated by the gods, and for cos-
mogony give us theogony.

Generation is simply explication or development, and the
generated is of the same nature with the generator, as the
Church- maintains in defining the Son to be consubstantial
with the Father. Hence the visible universe, as well as the
invisible forces of nature, as generated by the gods, was held
to be divine, both as a whole and in all its pai-ts. Rivers
and brooks, hills and valleys, groves and fountains, the ocean
and the earth, mountains and plains, the winds and the
W»,v*s, storms and tempests, thunder and lightning, the sun,
moon, and stars; the elements, fire, air, water, and earth; '
the generative forces of nature, vegetable, animal, and
human, were all counted divine, and held to be proper
objects of worship. Hence the fearful and abominable
superstitions that oppressed and still oppress heatlien nations
and tribes, the horrid, cruel, filthy, and obscene rites which
it were a shame even to name. These rites and superstitions
follow too logically from the assumed origin of all things
visible and invisible in generation or emanation, to have
originated with the unlearned and vulgar, or not to have
been the work of philosophers and theologers.

Dr. Dollinger holds that polytheism in polytheistic nations
and tribes precedes monotheism, or the worship of one God,

THE FACT OF CREATION. 69

and denies tliat pantheism is the primal error of Gentilism.
He appeal's to hold that the nations that apostatized, after
the confusion of tongues at B;,bjl, fell at once into tlie low-
est forms of African fetichism, and from that worked their
way up, step by step, to poUshed Greek and Roman poly-
theism, and tlience to Jewish and Christian monotheism.
13ut this is contrary to the natural law of deterioration.
Men by supernatural grace may be elevated from tlie lowest
grade to the highest at a single bound, but no man falls at
once from the highest virtue to the lowest depth of vice or
crime, or from the sublimest truth to the lowest and most
degrading form of error. African fetichism is the last stage,
EOt the first, of polytheism. The first error is always that
which lies nearest to the truth, and that demands the least
apparent departure from orthodoxy, or men's previous
beliefs. AYe know, Iiistorically, that the race began in tlie
patriarchal religion, in wJiat we call Christian theism, and
pantheism is the error that lies nearest, and that which most
easily seduces the mind trained in Christian tlieism.

What deceives Dr. Dollinger and others is that they attri-
bute the manifest superiority of Greek and Roman polythe-
ism over xifrican fetichism to a gradual amelioration of the
nations that embraced it; but history presents us no such
amelioration. The Homeric religion departs less from the
patriarchal religion than the polytheism of any later period
in the history of either pagan Greece or Rome. The super-
ioi'ity of Greek and Roman polytheism is due primarily to
the fact that it retained more of the primitive tradition, and
the apparent amelioration was due to the more general initi-
ation, as time went on, into the Eleusinian and other myste-
ries, in which the earlier traditions were preserved, and, a^t^r
Alexander the Great, to more familiar acquaintance with the
tradition of the East, especially the Jews. The mysteries
were instituted after the great Gentile Apostasy, but from
all that is possible now to ascertain of them, tliey preserved,
not indeed the prhnitive traditions of the race, but the earliest
traditions of the nations that apostatized. Certain it is, if
the Unity of God was taught in them, as seems not improb-
able, we have no reason to suppose that tiiey preserved the
tradition of the one God the creator of the heavens and the
earth. Neither in the mysteries nor in the popular myth-
ologies, neither with the Greeks nor the Romans, the Syrians
nor Assyrians, neither with the Egvptians nor the Indians,
neither with the Persians nor the Chinese, neither with the

iU REFUTATION OF ATHEISM.

Kelts nor the Teutons do we find any reminiscences of the
creative act, or fact of creation from nothing.

The oldest of the Yedas speak of God as spirit, recognize
most of liis essential attributes, and ascribe to liim apparently
moral qualities, but we find no recognition of him as Creator.
Socrates, as does Plato, dwells on the justice of the Divinity,
but neither recognizes God the Creator. Pere Gratry con-
tends indeed, in his Connaissance de Dieu^ that Moses,
Plato, Aristotle, Confucius, St. Augustine, St. Thomas
Aquinas, Descartes, Malebranche, Leibnitz, Bossuet, Fenelon,
in fact all philosophers of the first rank of all ages and
nations, agree in asserting substantially one and the same
theodicaea. Yet Plato asserts no God the Creator, at best,
only an intelligent artificer or architect, doing the best he
can with preexisting material. His theology is well summed
up by Yirgil in his JEneid :

Spiritus intus alit, totamque infusa per artus.
Mens agitat molem, et magno se corpore miscet.

Artistotle asserts God as the anima mundi, or soul of the
world, followed by Spinoza in his Natura Naturans^ and
which Pope versifies in his shallow Essay on- Man.

All are but parts of one stupendous whole,
Whose body nature is, and God the soul ;
That, changed through all, and yet in all the same,
Great in the earth as in the ethereal frame ;
Warms in the sun, refreshes in the breeze.
Glows in the stars, and blossoms in the trees;
Lives through all life, extends through all exteni,
Spreads undivided, operates unspent, «fcc.

Here is no creative God ; there is only the anima rmmdi
of the Brahmins, and of the best of the pagan philosophers.

Even some Christian philosophers, while they hold the fact
of creation certain from revelation, deny its probability by
reason. St. Paul says '' hy faith we understand the world
was framed by word of God," but St. Thomas, if we are
not mistaken, teaches that the same truth may be at once
a matter of revelation or faith and a truth cognizable by
natural reason and matter of science, and certain it is that
our greatest theologians undertake to prove the fact of
creation from reason or reasoning, or from data supplied by
the natural light of the soul, for they all attempt a rational
refutation of pantheism.

THE FACT OF CEEATIOlSr. 71

Tlic analysis of the ideal element of the object in tliono-ht,
we liave seen, shows that it is resolvable into being, exist-
ences, and their relation, and the analysis of the relation,
real only in the related, brings us, so to speak, face to face
with the Divine creative act. Heal and necessary being can
exist without creating, for it is, as say the theologians,
actufi i^urisshmts^ therefore in itself ens perfectissimum,
and is not obliged to go out of itself, in order either to be or
to perfect or complete itself, in which respect it is the con-
trai-y of the 7'ei7ie Seijn of Ilegel. It is in itself inllnite
Fulness, Pleroma^ PLenuvi^ while the reine Set/n is the
Byssos of the old Gnostics, or the Yoid of the Buddhists,
and even Hegel makes it not being, but a Becoming — das
Werden. The being given in ideal intuition is real and
necessar}'- being, self-existent, self-sufficing, complete in
itself, wanting nothing, and incapable of receiving any thing
in addition to what it is, and is eternally.

Hence the ontologist, starting with being as his prin-
cipium, can never arrive at existences, for being can be
under no extrinsic or intrinsic necessity of creating. Bat,
may not the psychologist conclude being from the intuition
of existences? Not at all, because existences, not existing
in and of themselves, are neither cognizable nor concei viable
without the intuition of being. Yet, though being is suffi-
cient in all respects for itself, it is cognizable by us only
irtediante its own act creating us and aftirming itself as the
first term or being in the ideal element of the object in
thought, and therefore only in its relation to the second
term, or existences. This relation under which both being
and existences, the necessary and the contingent, are given,
is the creative act of being, as we have seen, and therefore,
as that 'medlante which both being and existences are given,
is necessarily itself given in ideal intuition. It is as neces-
sarily given in the object in every thought as either being
or existences, the necessary or the contingent, and therefore
is ol)jectively as certain as either of the other two terms
without which no thought is possible, and is in fact more
immediately given, since it is only onedlatite the relation or
creative act of being that either being or existences them-
selves are given, or are objectively intuitive.

But not therefore, because being is cognizable only in its
relation to existences, does it follow that being itself is rela-
tion, or that all our cognitions are relative, or, as Gioberti
maintains, that all truth is relative ; nay, that the essence

72 REFUTATION OF ATHEISM.

of God, SLH implied in the inysterj of the Holy Trinity, is in
relation, in the relation of the three Persons of the God-
head. The relation is given in ideal intuition as the act of
real and necessary being. The relation then is extrinsic,
not intrinsic, and since being is real, necessary, independent,
self -existing, and self-sufficing, the creative act must be not
a necessary, but a free, voluntary act on the part of being.
Tlie relation, then, is not intrinsic, but freely and voluntarily
assumed.

Being is given in ideal intuition mediante its creative act,
then as creator or ens creans. But as nothing extrinsic or
intrinsic can oblige being, which is independent and self-
sufficing, to create or to act ad. extra^ it must be a free crea-
tor, free to create or not create, as it cliooses. Then being
must possess free-will and intelligence, for without intelli-
gence there can be no will, and witliout will no choice, no
free action. Being tlien must be in its nature rational, and
then it must be personal, for personality is the last comple-
ment of rational nature, that is, it must be a suppositum
that possesses, hy its nature, intelligence and f i-ee-will. Then
being, real and necessary, being in its plenitude, being in
itself, is — God, and creator of the heavens and the earth, and
all things visible and invisible.

But, it is objected, this assumes that we have immediate
intuition of being, and tlierefore of God, which is a propo-
sition improbated by the Holy See. ISTot to our knowledge.
The Holy See has improbated, if you 'will, the proposition
that the intellect has immediate cognition, that is, percep-
tion or empirical intuition of God ; but not, so far as we are
informed, the proposition that we have, 77ied iante its creative
act, intuition of real and necessary being in the ideal element
of the object in thought. The Holy See has defined against
the Traditionalists, that " the existence of God can be
proved with certainty bjM'easoning." But will the objector
tell us how we can prove the existence of God by any
argument from premises that contain no intuition of the
necessary, and therefore, since the necessary, save as con-
creted in being, is a nullity, of real and necessary being?
We may have been mistaught, but our logic-master taught
us that nothing can be in the conclusion, not contained, in
principle at least, in the premises. If we had not ideal intu-
ition of real and necessary being, there is no possible demon-
stration of the existence of God. St. Thomas finds the prin-
ciple of his demonstration of the existence of God, precisely

THE FACT or CREATION. 73

as we liave done, in the relation of cause and effect, or as we
saj, in the relation of being and existences ; but whence does
the mind come into possession of that relation, or of the
ideas expressed by tlie terms cause and effect f St. Thomas
does not tell us ; he simply takes it for granted that we have
them. What have we done but prove, which he does not
do, by analyzing, first, thought, then the object, then the
ideal, and finally the relation, that we have them, and at the
same time prove that being is a free, not a necessary cause,
and thus escape pantheism, which we should not do, if we
made cause as ultimate as being. Ens creans^ not simply ens
in se^ that is : JEns acting is the cause, and existences or
creatures are the effect.

The ideal, as we have found it, does not differ, we con-
■cede, from the ideal formula of Gioberti, Ens creat exist-
sntias, or Being creates existences. This has been objected
to as pantheistic. Xay,^an eminent Jesuit Father charged
ns with atheism because we defended it and we answeVed
him that to deny it- would be atheism. Even distinguished
professors of philosophy and learned and excellent men not
unfrequently fall into a sort of routine, let their minds be
cast in certain moulds, and fail to recognize their own
thoughts when expressed in unfamiliar terms._\ We have no
call to defend Gioberti, who, for aught we know, may have
understood the ideal formula in a pantheistic sense, but we do
not believe he did, and we know that we do not. Gioberti
asserts the formula, but declares it incapable of demonstra-
tion ; we think we have clearly shown, by the several
analyses into which we have entered, that each term of the
foi-mula is given intuitively in the ideal element of the
object, and is as certain and as undeniable as the fact of
thougjit or our own existence, and no demonstration in any
case whatever can go fuither. As we have found and pre-
sented the formula it is only the first verse of Genesis, or
the first article of the Creed. We see not, then, how it can
be cliarged either with atheism or pantheism.

Perhaps the suspicion arises from the use of the present
tense, creat, or "is creating," as if it was intended to
assert being as the immanent cause — the causa esse7itiah's,
not as the causa efficlens, of existences ; but this is not the
case with us, nor do we believe it was with Gioberti, for he
seems to us to take unwearied pains to prove the contrary.
We use the present tense of the verb to indicate that the cre-
ative act that calls existences from nothing is a permanent

71 EEFUTATION OF ATHEISM.

or continuous act, that it is identically one and the same act
that creates and that sustains existences, or that the act of
creation and of conservation are identical, as we shall explain
in the next section.

The formula is infinitely removed from pantheism,
because, though given in intuition mediante the creative
act of being, being itself is given as real and necessary, inde-
pendent and self-sufficing, and therefore under no extrinsic
or intrinsic necessity of creating. The creative act is, as we
liave seen, a free act, and it is distinguished, on tlie one
liand, from being as the act from the actor, and on the other,
from existences as the effect from the cause. There is here
no place for pantheism, less indeed than in the principle of
cause and effect which St. Thomas adopts as the principle of
liis demonstration of the existence of God. The relation of
cause and effect is necessary, and if cause is placed in the
category of being, creation is necessary, which is pantheism.
Yet St. Thomas, the greatest of the Schoolmen, was no pan-
theist. AVe have avoided the possibility of mistake by plac-
ing the causative power in the cateirory of being, but the
exercise of the power in the category of relation, at once
distinguishing and connecting being and existences.

The objector forgets, moreover, tiiat while we have by
our analysis of thought established the reality of the object,
or its existence a iKirte rei, and asserted the objectivity
and therefore the reality of the ideal, we have nowhere
found or asserted the ideal alone as the object in thought.
We have found and asserted it only as the ideal element
of the object, which must in principle precede the empirical
element, but it is never given separately from it, and it
takes both the ideal and the empirical in their relation to
constitute the object in any actual thought. The ideal and
the empirical elements of the complex object are distin-
guished by the inteUectus agens^ or reflection, in which the
soul acts, never by intuition, ideal or empirical, in either of
which the action originates with the object. Most men
never do distinguish them during their whole lives ; even
the mass of philosophers do not distinguish them, or distin-
guish between intuition and reflection. The peripatetics,
in fact, l)egin with the reflective activity, and hardly touch
upon the question of intuition, save in what they have to
say of phantasms and species. Their principles they t-ake
from reflection, not from the analysis of thought or its
object. We do not dissent from their principles or their

THE FACT OF CKEATION. 75

method, but we do not regard their principles as ultimate,
and we think the field of intuition, back of reflection, needs
a culture which it does not receive from them, not even
from St. Thomas, still less from those routinists who profess
to follow him. We do not dissent from the Thomist philos-
ophy ; we accept it fully and fi'ankly, but not as in all
respects complete. There are, in our judgment, questions
that lie back of the starting-point of that philosophy, which,
in order to meet the snbtilties and refinements of modern
pantheists or atheists, the philosopher of to-day must raise
and discuss.

These questions relate to what in principle precedes the
reflective action of the soul, and are solved by the distinc-
tion between intuition and reflection, and between ideal
intuition and empirical intuition or perception, that is, cog-
nition. What we explain by ideal intuition, the ancients
called the dictates of reason, the dictates of nature, and
assumed them to be principles inserted in the very constitu-
tion of the human mind ; Descartes called them innate
ideas ; Keid regarded them as constituent principles of
man's intellectual and moral nature ; Kant, as the laws or
forms of the human understanding. All these make them
more or less subjective, and overlook their objectivity, and
consequently, cast doubts on the reality of our knowledge.
" It may be real to us, but how prove that it is not very

v*

unreal to other minds constituted differently from ours
We have endeavored to show that these are the ideal ele-
ments of the fact of experience, and are given in objective
or ideal intuition, which is the assertion to the mind l)y its
own action of real and necessary being itself, and therefore
our knowledge, as far as it goes, is universally true and apo-
dictic, not true to our minds only.

The objection commonly raised to the ideal formula. Ens
creat exis'tentias. is, not that it is not true, but that it is not
the principle from which philosophy starts, but the end at
which philosophy arrives. This, in one sense, if we speak
of the reflective order, is true, and the philosophy most in
vo^ue does not reach it even as its end at all. Yet by using
reflection we shall And that it is given in the object of every
thought, as we have shown, the first as well as the last. Ideal
intuition is a real affirmation to the mind by the act of the
ideal itself, but it is not perception or distinct cognition,
because, as we have said, it is not given separately, but only
as the ideal or a irriorl element of the object, and is never

76 REFUTATION OF ATHEISM.

intuitively distinguished or distinguishable from it. This
is, we tliink, a sufficient answer to the objection, which is
founded on a misapprehension of what is really meant by
the assertion that the ideal formula is the principle of
science and intuitively given. It is so given, but, it is only
by reflection that the mind distinguishes it, and is aware of
possessing it.

Xn. EXISTENCES.

Having found the first term of the ideal formula to be
real and necessary being, and that real and necessary being
is God the creator of all things distinguishable from him-
self, we may henceforth drop the term beino- or ens and use
that of Deiis or God, and proceed to consider the second
term, existences or creatures. God and creatures include
all that is or exists. What is not creature and yet is, is God ;
what is not God and yet exists, is creature, the product of
the act of God. What is neither God nor creature is nothing.
There is nothing and can be nothing that is not either the
one or the other. Abstractions, prescinded from their con-
cretes, and possibilities prescinded from the power or ability
of the real, we cannot too often repeat, are nullities, and no
object of intuition, either ideal or empirical. This excludes
the ens in genere, or being in general, of Rosmini, and the
7'eine Seyn of Hegel, wliich is also an abstraction, or merely
possible being. An abstract or possible being has no power
or tendency, as Hegel pretends, to become by self-evolution
eitlier a concrete or actual being. Evolution of nothing
gives nothing. Hence whatever truth there may be in
the details of the respective pliilosophies of Rosmini and
Hegel, they are in their principles unreal and worthless,
proceeding on the assumption that nothing can make itself
something. Existences are distinguishable from being and
are nothing without the creative act of God. Only that act
stands between them and absolute nullity. God then does
not form them from a preexisting matter, but creates tliem
from nothing. He does not evolve them from himself, for
then they would be the Divine Being itself, and indistin-
guishable from it, contrary to what has already been estab-
lished, namely, that they are distinguished from God as well
as joined to him laediante his creative act. God is not a
necessary but a free creator ; creatures are not then evolved

EXISTENCES. 77

from his own being, but himself, a free creator, is necessarily
distinct from and independent of them; and as without
creation there is nothing- but himself, it follows necessarily
that he must, if he creates existences at all, create them from
nothing, by the word of his power, as Christian theology
teaches.

But the fact that they are creatures and distinct from the
Creator proves, also, that they are snbstances, or snbstantial
existences, and therefore, as philosophers say, second causes.
If creatures had no substantial existence, they w^ould be
mere phenomena or appearances of the divine being or sub-
stance, and therefore could not be really distinguishable
from God himself; which would be a virtual denial of the
creative act and the reality of existences, and therefore of
.God himself; for it has been shown that there is no intu-
ition of being save mediante the creative act of being, or
without the intuition of existences, that is, of both terms of
the relation. It would deny, what has been amply proved,
that the object of intuition, whether ideal or empirical, is
and must be i-eal, because it does and must present or afhrm
itself, which, if unreal or mere appearance, it could not do,
since the unreal has no activity and can be no object of
thought, as the Cosmists themselves concede, for they hold
the phenomena without the substance that appears in them
are unthinkable. Moreover, the object in intuition presents
or aftirms itself as it is, and existences all jjresent or affirm
themselves- as real, as things, as substances, as second causes,
and really distinguishable from Dr. Newman's "Notional"
propositions, which propose nothing, and in which nothing
real is noted.

It is here where Cousin and the pantheists, who do not
expressly deny creation, commit their fatal mistake. Spinoza,
Cousin, and others assert one onlj'^ substance, which they
call God, and which the Cosmists call Nature. Hence the
creative act, if recognized at all, produces only phenomena,
not substantial existences, and what they call creation is
only the manifestation or apparition of the one only sub-
stance. It is possible that this error comes from the defini-
tion of substance adopted by Descartes, and by Spinoza
after him, namely, that which exists or can be conceived in
itself, without another. This definition was intended by
the Schoolmen, and possibly by Descartes also, as simply to
mark the distinction between substance and mo'de, attribute,
or accident ; but, taken rigidly as it is by Spinoza, it war-

78 REFUTATION OF ATHEISM.

rants his doctrine, tliat God is the one only substance, as he
is the one only being, for he alone exists in se. The uni-
vei-se and all it contains are therefore only modes or attri-
butes of God, the only substance. The error, also, may
have arisen in part from using being and suhstance as per-
fectly synonymous terms. JEns is substantia, but every
substantia is not ens. Substance is any thing that can sup-
port accidents or produce effects ; Lns is that which is, and
in strictness is applicable to God alone, who gives his name
to Moses as I am ; I am that am, — SUM QUI SUM. There
may be, medlante the creative act of God, many substances
or existences, but there is and can be only one being, God,
All existences have their being, not in themselves, but in
God mediante the creative act, according to what St. Paul
says, " in him we live, and move, and are," in ipso vivi7nus, et
mooemnr, et sumus. Acts xvii, 28.

Existences are substantial, that is, active or causative in
their own sphere or degree. The definition of substance by
Leibnitz — though we think we have found it in some of the
mediaeval Doctors, as vis activa, corresponding to the Ger-
man h-oft and the English and French force, is a proper
definition so far, whatever may be thought of what he adds,
that it always involves effort or endeavor. In this sense
existences must be substances or else they could not be given
intuitively, as in our analysis of the object we have seen they
are, for in intuition the object is active and presents or
afKrms itself. Strictly speaking, as we have seen in the
analysis of relation, nothing that exists is or can be passive,
for passivity is simply in potentia ad <2C^!^^7?^ /' whatever
exists at all exists inactuund so far is necessarily vis activa.
Existences in their principle are given intuitively, and their
principle cannot be substantial and they unsubstantial. But
it is necessarj^ here to distinguish between the suhstans and
the substantia, between that which stands under and upholds
or supports existences or created substances, and the exist-
ences themselves. The sabstans is the creative act of God,
and the substantia or existence is that which it stands under
and upholds. This enables us to correct the error of the
deists, who regard the cosmos, though created in the first
instance and set a-going, now that it is created and constituted
with its laws and forces as able to go of itself without any
Bupercosmic support, propulsion, or direction, as a clock or
watch, when once wound up and set a-going, goes of itself
— till it runs down. It has now no need of God, it is suffi-

EXISTENCES. 79

cient for itself, and God has notliino^ to do with it, but, if he
chooses, to contemplate its operation from his supramundane
lieight. But this old deistical race, now nearly extinct,
except with onr scientists, forgot that the w\atcli or clock
does not run by its own inherent force, and that it is pro-
pelled by a force in accordance with which it is constructed
indeed, but which is exterior to it and independent of it.
The cosmos, not having its being in itself and existing only
mediante the creative act of being, can subsist and operate
only by virtue of that act. It is only that act that draws
it from nothing and that stands between all existences or
creatures and nothing. Let that act cease and we should
instantly sink into the nothingness we were before we were
created. This proves that the act of creation and that of con-
servation are one and the same act, and hence it is that intui-
tion of existences is, ijjso facto^ intuition of the creative act,
without which they are nothing, and of which they are only
the external terminus or product. Tliis explains the dis-
tinction between siihsfans and substantia^ and shows why
the suhstnns is and must be tlie creative act of God. Sub-
stances rest or depend on the creative act for their very
existence ; it is their foundation, and they must fall through
without it, though they stand under and su^jport their own
effects or productions as second causes.

The creative act, it follows, is a permanent not a transient
act, and God is, so to speak, a continuous creator, and
creation is a fact not merely in the past but in the present,
constantly going on before our eyes. AVe would call God the
immanent, not the transitory cause of creation, as the deist
supposes, were it not that theologians have appropriated the
term immanent cause in their explanation of the relation of
the Father to the Son and of both Father and Son to the
Holy Ghost in the ever-blessed Trinity, and if it had not
been abused by Spinoza and others. Spinoza says God is
the immanent not the transitory cause of the universe ; but
he meant by this that God is immanent in the universe as the
essence or substance is the cause of the mode or atti-ibute,
that is, the causa esseyitlalis, not causa efflciens, which is
really to deny that God creates substantial existences, and to
imi)ly that he is the subject acting or causing in phenomena.
God is immanent cause oidj- in the seuoc that he is manent
meiliante his creative act in the effect or existences produced
from nothing by the omnipotent energy of his word, creat-
ing and sustaining them as second causes or the subject of

80 EEFUTATIOX OF ATHEISM.

tlieir own acts, not as the subject acting in them. It is what
theologians call the " efficacious presence" of God in all his
works. He is the eminent cause of the acts of all his
creatures, inasmuch as he is the cause of their causality,
causa causar am • as we explained in our analj'sis of Tiela-
tion, but he is not the subject that acts in tlieir acts. This
shows the nearness of God to all the works of his hands,
and their absolute dependence on him for all they are, all
they can be, all they can do, all they have or can have. It
shows simply that they are nothing, and therefore can know
nothing, but by his creative act. The grossest and most
palpable of all sophisms is that which makes man and nature
God, or God identically man and nature. Either error
originates in the failure to recognize the act of creation and
the relation of existences to being as given in the ideal
intuition.

The cosmists make God the substance or reality of the
Cosmos, and deny that he is supercosmic ; but their error
is manifest now that we have shown that God is the Creator
of the cosmos, and all things visible and invisible. The
cosmic plienomena are not phenomena of the Divine
Being, but are phenomena or manifestations of created
nature, and of God only mediante his creative act. The
cosmos, with its constitution and laws or nature, is his crea-
ture; produced from nothing and sustained by his creative
act, without which it is still nothing. God then, as the creator
of nature, is independent of nature, and necessarily super-
natural, supercosmic, or supramundane. as the theologians
teach, and as all the world, save a few philosophers, scien-
tists, and their dupes, believe and always have believed.

God being supernatural, and the creative act by which he
creates and sustains nature being a free act on his part, the
theory of the rationalists and naturalists that holds him
bound, hedged in, by what they call the laws of nature, is
manifestly false and absurd. These laws do not bind the
Creator, because he is their author. The age talks much of
freedom, and is universally agitating for liberty of all sorts,
but there is one liberty, without which no liberty is possible,
it forgets — the liberty of God. To deny it, is to deny his
existence. God is not the Fate, or inexorable Destiny, of
the pagan classics, especially of the Greek dramatists.
Above nature, independent of it, subject to no extrinsic or
intrinsic necessity, except that of being, and of being what
he is, God is free to do any thing but contradict, that is.

EXISTENCES. 81

annihilate himself, Tvhicli is the real sio-nificance of the Scho-
lastic "principle of contradiction." He cannot be and not
be ; he cannot choose to be or not to be what he is, for he is
real and necessary being, and being in its plenitude. He
can do nothing that contradicts his own being or attributes,
for they are all necessary and eternal, and hence St. Paul
says, " it is impossible for God to lie." That wonld be to
act contrary to his nature, and the Di^ane nature and the
Divine Being are identical, and indistinguishable m r^. It
would be to contradict his very being, his own eternal,
immutable, and indestructible essence, and what is called the
nature of things.

Saving this, God is free to do whatever he will, for extrin-
sic to him and his act nothing is possible or impossible ;
since extrinsic to him there is simplj nothing. His liberty
is as universal and as indestructible as his own necessary and
eternal being. He is free to create or not as he chooses, and
as in his own wisdom he chooses. The creative act is there-
fore a free act, and as nature itself, with all its laws, is only
that act considered in its eifects, it is absurd to suppose that
nature or its laws, which it founds and upholds, can bind him,
restrict him, or in any way interfere with his absolute freedom.
God cannot act contrary to his own most perfect nature or
being, but nothing except his own perfection can determine
his actions or his providence. Following out the ideal judg-
ment, or considering the principles intuitively given, they
are alike the principles of the natural and of the supernatu-
ral. They assert the supernatural in asserting God as crea-
tor ; they assert his providence by asserting that creation
and conservation are only one and the same act, and the free
act, or the act of the free, uncontrolled, and unnecessitated
will of God. Hence also it follows that God is free, if he
chooses, to makes us a supernatural revelation of his will,
and to intervene supernatu rally or by miracles in human or
cosmic affairs. Miracles are in the same order with the fact
of creation itself, and if facts, are as provable as any other
facts.

XIII.— GOD AS FINAL CAUSE.

We have in the foregoing sections proved with all the
certainty we have that we think or exist, the existence of
God as real and necessary being, and as the free, intelligent.
Vol. n.— 6

82 REFDTATIOiNr OF ATHEISM.

voluntary, anl therefore personal Creator and Upholder of
the universe and all thinscs therein visible and invisible, in
accordance with the teaching's of Christian theism, and the
primitive and universal tradition of the j-ace, especially of
the more enlightened and progressive portion of the race.
This would seem to suffice to complete our task, and to
redeem our promis3 to refute Atheism and to prove Theism.

But Ave have only proved the existence of God as First
Cause, and that all existences proceed from him by way of
creation, in opposition to generation, emanation, evolution,
or formation. We have established indeed, that the physi-
cal laws of the universe, the natural laws treated by our
scientists, are from God, created by him, and subject to his
will, or existing and operative only through his free creativ^e
act. But this, if we go no further, is only a specnlative
truth, and has no bearing on practical life. Stopping thei'e,
we might well say, with Jefferson, " What does it matter to
m3, whether my neighbor believes in one God, or twenty ?
It neither breaks my leg, nor picks my pocket." God as
first cause is the physical Governor, not the moral Governor
of the universe, a physical, not a moral Providence, and his
laws execute themselves without the concurrence of the
will of his creatures, as the lightning that rends the
oak, the winds and waves that scatter and sink our richly
fi-eighted argosies, the fire that devastates our cities, respira-
tion by the lungs, the circulation of the blood by the heart, the
secretion of bile by the liver or of the gastric juice by the
stomach, the growth of plants and animals, indeed all the
facts or groups of facts called natural laws, studied, described,
and classified by our scientists, and knowledge of which
passes in our day for science, and even for philosopliy. The
knowledge of these facts, or groups of facts, may throw light
on the laws and conditions of physical life, but it introduces
us to no moral order, and throws no light on the laws and
conditions of spiritual life, or the end for which we are cre-
ated and exist.

The man who believes only in God as first cause differs
not, pi-actically, fi-om the man wlio believe'fe in no God at
all : and it is, no donl)t, owing to- the fact that the age stops
with God as fii-st cause, that it is so tolerant of atheism, and
that we find people who pr.)fess to believe in Christianity
Avho _yet maintain that atheism is not at all incompatible witli
morality — peo))le who hold in high moral esteem men who,
like lialph Waldo Emerson, Herbert Spencer, Professors

GOD AS FESTAL CAUSE. 83

Huxley and Tyndall, recognize no distinction between phys-
ical laws and the moral law, and assert the identity of the
law of gravitation and of purity of heart. Hence the Tran-
scendeutalist rule of life: "Obey thyself," "Act out thy-
self," "Follow thy instincts;" and hence also the confusion
of physical or sentimental love with supernatural charity,
the worship of the beautiful with the worship of God, and
of art with religion, so characteristic of modern literature
and speculative thought. Indeed, the first step in the
downward progress towards atheism, is the denial or non-
recognition of the theological order.

"We have proved that God is being, being in its plenitude,
being itself, and being in itself ; therefore that he necessarily
includes in hinjself, iu their unity and actuality, all perfec-
tion, truth, power, intelligence, wisdom, goodness, freedom,
will, &c. We do not hold, with Cousin and Plato, that the
beautiful is an absolute and universal idea, since the beauti-
ful exists only for creatures endowed with sensibility and
imagination, and therefore is not and cannot be absolute
being or a necessary perfection of being; yet we do hold,
with the Schoolmen, that g;w, verum, and honum are abso-
lute and identical. Hence St. Augustine teaches that exist-
•ence itself, since it participates of being, is a good, and
■consequently even the eternall_y lost are gainers by their
existence, though by their own fault they have made it a
source of everlasting pain. To be is alwaj^s better than not
to be.

That God is the final cause of creation follows necessarily
from the fact that he is its free, voluntary first cause. If
Ood were, as Cousin maintains, a necessary creator, he could
act only adjinem, not propter Jinem, and therefore could not
be asserted as the final cause of creation ; but being a free
creator not compelled by any extrinsic or intrinsic necessity,
as he cannot be, since he is being in its plenitude, ens jper-
fectissimum^ he can create only for some end, and conse-
quently only for himself, for besides himself there is and
can be no end for which he can create. He is therefore the
final cause of creation, as well as its first cause. Hence St. Paul
tells us that "for him, and in him, and to hiin are all things."
The conclusion is strengthened by considering that God,
being all-powerful and essentially wise and good, it would
contradict his own being and attributes to create without
any end, or for any but a good purpose or end, and he alone

84 REFUTATION OF ATHEISM

is good, for the very reason tliat he alone is being, and hi»
creatui'es are being and good only by participation.

No doubt it may be said that God creates for the good of
creatures, but he is the good as he is the being of creatures,
and he can give them good only by giving them himself, for
besides himself there is no good for them, since beside him
there is no good at all. The end or final cause of a creature
is its good, and when we say God is the final cause or end
of a particular existence, we say he is that which it must
seek and possess in order to attain to and possess its supreme
good or beatitude. When we say God creates all things for
himself, we simply mean that he creates all things for the
manifestation of his own glory in the life and beatitude of
his creatures. The end or final cause of an existence is in.
obtaining the complement or perfection of its being. It is
not simply beatitude, but beatitude in God that is the end.
Creation flows out from the infinite fulness of the Divine-
Love, which would diffuse itself in tlie creation and beati-
tude of existences, and God cannot beatify them otiierwise
than through their participation of his own beatitude,
God, then, is the ultimate and the final cause of creation.

But wliy could not God create existences for progress, or
for progress through infinity ? That w^ould be a contradic-
tion in terms. Progress is motion towards an end, and where-
there is no end there is and can be no progress. Progress
is advancing from the imperfect to the perfect, and if there
is no perfect, there can be no advance towards it ; if there
is progress, it must finally come to an end. The doctrine
of infinite or indefinite progressiveness of man, so popular
in this nineteenth century, is based on the denial alike of
creation and the final cause of man and the cosmos. It
supposes development instead of creation, and admits only
the physical laws of nature, which operate as blind and fatal
forces, like what is called instinct in man and animals.
Hence we have a class of scientists who seek to elevate man
by improving, through wise and skilful culture, the breed.
How do these men who deny God as final cause, and hold
the theory of development or evolution, account for the
existence of moral ideas or the universal belief in a moral
law ? This belief and these ideas cannot be obtained either
by observation or by induction from the stud}' of the phys-
ical laws of nature ; and if we hold them to be given intui-
tively, we assert their reality, atfirm that there is a moral
order, and then, a final cause of creation.

GOD AS FINAL CAUSE. 85

We maintain that the soul really has intuition of God as
■final cause in a sense analo_:^ous to that in which we have
seen it has intuition of being as first cause. St. Thomas,
•while he denies that God \?, j^er se notus, concedes* that we
have intuition of him, as we have explained intuition, or a
confused cognition of him as the beatitude of man. The
soul, he says, naturally desires beatitude, and what it natu-
rally desires, it naturally apprehends, though it be confusedly.
In our language, the soul desires beatitude ; but it cannot
desire what it has no intuition of, or what is in no sense
presented or affirmed to it, and since God is himself this beati-
tude, the soul must have some intuition of God as its good
or final cause. It is true, St. Thomas says, the soul does not
know explicitly that it is God that presents or affirms him-
self as the beatitude it desires. It does not know that it is
God any more than it does when it sees a man coming ■svith-
out being able to distinguish whether it is Peter or some
otiier man that is coming ; yet it is as really intuition of
Ood as final cause, as the intuition of the idea is intuition
of God as real and necessary being, or as first cause. In
neither case is there a distinct or explicit cognition that what
is presented is God, and it comes to know that it is so only
by reflection.

Certainly every soul desires happiness, supreme beatitude ;
and desire is more than a simple want. Desire is an affec-
tion of the will, a reaching forth of the soul towards the
object desired. Wliat a man desires he, in some degree at
least, wills ; but will is not a faculty that can in any degree
act without light or intelligence. The soul can will only
what is presented to it as good ; it cannot will evil for the
reason that it is evil, though it may wnll the lesser good
instead of the greater, and a present good instead of a dis-
tant or future good ; for it has the freedom of choice. Yet
it is certain that the soul finds its complete satisfaction in no
natural or created good. It craves an unbounded good, and
will be satisfied with nothing finite. Why, but because it
has an ever-present intuition that it was made for an infinite
good? AVhy, but because God the infinite everywhere and
at every instant presents or affirms himself to the soul as
that alone which can fill it, or constitute its beatitude? The
fact that every limited or created good is insufficient to
satisfy the soul has been noted and chvelt on by philosophers,

* Sum. Theol. P. T. quiBst. 2, a. 1. ad Uim.

bo KEFUTATIOIs OF ATHEISM.

sages, proi^hets, and preachers in all ages of the world,
and it is the theme of tlie poet's wail, and the source of
nearly all of life's tragedies. Yet it is inexplicable on any-
possible hypothesis except that of supposing the soul was
made for God, and has an intuitive intimation of the secret
of its destiny.

Assuming, then, the intuition of God as final cause in the
desire of beatitude, the assertion of it rests on the same
authority that does the assertion of the ideal as being, or
being as God, and therefore, as our several analyses have
proved, it is as certain as either the subject or object in the
fact of thought, or as the fact that we think or exist. In
fact, as we have already seen, it is included in the creative
act of being as a free, voluntary act. Being cannot act
freely without will, and no one can will without wilHng an
end ; and no good being without -^villing a good end. Na
really good end is possible but God himself ; we may, there-
fore, safely and certainly conclude God is our last cause as
well as our first cause, at once the beginning and end, the
Alpha and the Omega of all existences, the original and end
of "all things.

"We are now able to assert for man a moral law and to give
its reason in distinction from the natural or physical laws of
the scientists. The physical laws are established by God as
first cause, and are the laws or created forces operative in
existences in their procession, by way of creation, from God,
as first cause ; the moral law is established by God as final
cause, and prescribes the conditions on which rational exist-
ences can return to God, without being absorbed in him, and
fulfil their destiny, or attain to perfect beatitude. This com-
pletes the demonstration of Christian Theism.

If God be the first and last cause of existences, they must
have, so to speak, two movements, the one by way of crea-
tion from God as their first cause, the otherunder the moral
law, of return to him as their end, beatitude, or the perfec-
• tion of their nature, and the perfect satisfaction of its
wants. These two movements found two orders, which we
may designate the initial and the teleological. The error of
the rationalists, whether in morals or religion, is not wholly
in the denial of supernatural revelation and grace, but in
denying or disregarding the teleological order, and in endeav-
oring to find a basis for religion and morality in the initial
or physical order, or, as Gioberti calls it, tlie order of gene-
sis. Thus Dr. Potter, Anglican Bishop of Pennsylvania

aOD AS FINAL CAUSE. 87

latolv deceased, in his work on the philosophy of religion,
asserts that religion is a law of human nature, that is, if it
means any thing, the law of his physical nature and secreted
as the liver secretes bile. In like manner the ancient and
modern Transcendentalists, Gnostics, or Pneuniatici, who
make religion and morality consist in acting out one's self, or
one's instincts, place religion and morality in the initial
order, and in the same category with any of the physical
laws or forces of the cosmos. The modern doctrine of the
correlation of forces, which denies all distinction of physical
force and moral power — a fatal error — originated in the
assumption of the initial order as the only real order. The
creative act is not completed in the initial order, or order of
natural generation, and does not end with it. Man is not
completed by being born, and existences, to be fulfilled or
perfected, must return to God as their final cause, in whom
alone they can find their perfection as they find their origin
in him as their first cause. The irrational existences, since
they exist for the rational and are not subject to a moral
law, can return only in the rational. As the teleological
order, as well as the initial, is founded by the creative act of
God, it is ecpially real, and the science that denies or over-
looks it, is only inchoate or initial, as in fact is all that pnsses
under the name of science in this age of boasted scientific
light and progress.

We may remark here that though we can prove by
reason that God is our final cause, our beatitude, because the
Supreme Beatitude, it by no means follows that the soul can
attain to him and accomplish its destiny by its natural pow-
ers, without being born again, or without the assistance of
supernatural revelation and grace. Our reason, properly exer-
cised, sutfices, as we have just seen, to prove the reality of
the two orders, the initial and the teleological, but as God,
either as First cause or as Final cause, is supercosmic or
supernatural, it would seem that nature must be as unable to
attain of itself to God as its end, or to perfect itself, as it
is to originate or sustain itself, without the creative act.
They who, while professing to believe in God as creator,
yet deny the supernatural order, forget that God is super-
natural, and that the creative act that founds nature with
all its laws and forces, is purely supernatural. The super-
natural then exists, founds nature herself, sustains it, and
is absolutely independent of it, is at once its origin and end.

The supernatural is God and what he does directly and

88 REFUTATION OF ATHEISM.

immediately by himself ; the natural is what he does medi-
ately through created agencies, or the operation of natural
laws or second causes created by him. The creation of man
and the universe is supernatural, and so, as we have seen, is
their conservation, which is their continuous creation ; the
growth of plants and animals, all the facts in the order of
genesis, are natural, for though the order itself originates in
the supernatural, the facts of the order itself are etfected by
virtue of natural laws, or as is said, by natural causes. Yet
as God is not bound or hedged in by his laws, and as he is
absolutely free and independent, there is no reason apriori,
why he may not, if he chooses, intervene supernaturally as
well as naturally in the affairs of his creatures, and if necessary
to their perfection there is even a strong presumption that
he will so intervene. If revelation and supernatural grace are
necessary to enable us to enter the teleological order, to per-
severe in it, and attain to the full complement or perfection
of our existence, we may reasonably conclude that the infi-
nite love or unbounded and overflowing goodness which
prompted him, so to speak, to create us, will provide them.
Hence revelation, miracles, the whole order of grace, are as
provable, if facts, as any otlier class of facts, and are in their
principle, included in the ideal judgment.

XIV. OBLIGATION OF WORSHIP.

How or in what manner God is to be worshipped, whether
we are able by the light of nature to say what is the worship
he demands of us, and by our natural strength to render it,
or whether we need supernatural revelation and supernatu-
ral grace to enable us to worship him acceptably, are ques-
tions foi-eign from the purpose of the present inquiry. All
that is designed here is to show that to worship God is a
moral duty,"enjoined by the natural law, or that the moral
law obliges us to worship God in the way and manner he
prescribes, whether the prescribed worship be made known
to us by natural reason or only by supernatural revelation.
In other words, our design is to' show that morals are not
separable from religion, nor religion from morals.

The question is not an idle one, and has a practical bear-
ing, especially in our age and country, in which the ten-
dency is to a total separation of church and state, religion
and morals. The state with us disclaims all right to estab-

OBLIGATION OF WORSHIP. 89

lish a state religion, and all obligation to recognize and sup-
port religion, or to punish offences against it, at least for the
reason that the\^ are offences against religion ; and yet it
claims tlie right to establish a state morality, to enforce it
by its legisUition, and to punish through its courts all
offences against it. Thus the government seeks to suppress
Mormonism, not as a rehgion indeed, but as a morality. As
a religion, Mormonism is free, and in no respect repugnant
to the constitution and laws of the country ; but as a morality
it is contrary to the state moraHty and is forbidden : and con-
sequently, under the guise of suppressing it as morality, the
law suppresses it, in fact, as religion. Is this distinction
between religion and morality real, and does not the estab-
lishment of a state morality necessarily imply the establish-
ment of a state religion? Are rehgion and morals sepa-
rable, and independent of each other? A question of great
moment in its bearing on political rights.

Among the Gentiles, religion and morality had no neces-
sary connection with each oUier. Ethics were not religious,
nor religion ethical. The Gentiles sought a basis for moral-
ity independent of the gods. Some placed its principle in
pleasure. Others, and these the better sort, in justice or
right, anterior and superior to the gods, and binding both
gods and men. This was necessary with the Gentiles, who
had forgotten the creative act, and held to a plurality of
gods and goddesses whose conduct was far from being uni-
formly edifying, nay, was sometimes, and not unfrequently,
scandalous, as we see from Plato's Euthypliro and the
Meditations of the Emperor. Bat it does not seem to '
have occurred to these Gentiles that abstractions are nothing,
and that justice or right, unless integrated in a real and con-
crete power, is a mere abstraction, and can bind neither
gods nor men ; and if so integrated, it is God, and is really
the assertion of one God above their gods, the " God of
gods," as he was called by the Hebrews.

The tendency in our age is to seek a basis outside of God
for an independent morality, and we were not permitted by
its editors to assert, in the New Ainerican Cyclopedia^ that
"Atheism is incompatible with morality," and were obliged
to insert "as theistssay." But not only do men seek to con-
struct a morality without God, but even a religion and a
worship based on atheism, as we see in the so-called Free
Religionists, and the Positivists, which goes further than the
request for " the play of Hamlet with the part of the Prince
of Penmark left out."

90 REFUTATIOX OF ATHEISM.

Even among Christian writers on ethics we find some who,
in a more or less modified form, continue the Gentile tra-
dition, and would have us res^ard the moral law as independ-
ent of the will of God, and hold that things are right and
obligatory not because God commands them, but that he
commands them because they are right and obligatory.
They distinguish between the Divine Will and the Divine
Essence, and make the moral law emanate from the essence,
not from the will of God. If we make the law the
expression of the will of God, we deny that the dis-
tinctions of right and wrong are eternal, make them
dependent on mere will and arbitrariness, and assume
that God might, if he had willed, have made what is
now right wrong, and what is now wrong right, which is
impossible; for he can by his will no more found or alter
the relations between moral good and moral evil than he can
make or unmake the mathematical truths and axioms. Yery
true ; but solely because he cannot make, unmake, or alter
his own eternal and necessary being.

The moral law is the application of the eternal law in the
moral government of rational existences, and the eternal
law. according to St. Augustine, is the eternal will or reason
of God. The moral law necessarily expresses both the rea-
son and the will of God. There are here two questions
which must not be confounded, namely, 1, What is the rea-
son of the law? 2, Wherefore is the law obligatory on us
as rational existences ? The first question asks what is the
reason or motive on the part of God in enacting the law,
and, though that concerns him and not us, we may answer:
Doubtless, it is the same reason he had for creating us, and
is to be found in his infinite love and goodness. The second
question asks, Why does the law oblige us? that is, why is
it law for us ; since a law that does not oblige is no law at all.

This last is the real ethical question. The answer is not,
It is obligatory because what it enjoins is good, holy, and
necessary to our perfection or beatitude. Tiiat would be a
most excellent reason why we should do the things enjoined,
but is no answer to the question, why are we bound to do
them, and are guilty if we do not ? Why is obedience
to the law a duty, and disobedience a sin ? It is necessary
to distinguish with the theologians between i\\Q finis ope r-
antis and the finis operis, between the work one does, and
the motive for which one does it. Every work that tends
to realize the theological order is good, but if we do it not

OBLIGATION OF WORSHIP. 91

from the proper motive, we are not moral or virtuous iu
doing it. AVe must have the intention of doino- it in obedi-
ence to the law
to command us.

What, then, is the ground of the right of God to com-
mand us, and of our duty to obey him ? The ground of
both is in tlie creative act. God has a complete and abso-
lute right to us, because, liaving made us from nothing, we
are his, wlioUy his, and not our own. He created us from
notliing, and only his creative act stands between us and
nothing ; he therefore owns us, and therefore we are his,
body and soul, and all that we have, can do, or acquire. He
is therefore our Sovereign Lord and Proprietor, with supreme
and absolute dominion over us, and the absolute riglit, as
absolute owner, to do what he will with us. His right to
command is founded on his dominion, and his dominion is
founded on his creative act, and we are bound to obey him,
whatever he commands, because we are his creature, abso-
lutely liis, and in no sense our own.

Dr. Ward of the Dublin Review, in his very able work
on Nature and Grace, objects to this doc'rine, which we
published in the Review some years ago, that it makes the
obligation depend on the command, not on the intrinsic
excellence, goodness, or sanctity of the thing commanded,
and consequently if, jyer impossihile, we could suppose the
devil created us, we might be under two contradictory obli-
gations, one to obey the devil our creator, commanding us
to do evil, and our own reason which commands us to do
that whicli is intrinsically good. What we answered Dr.
Ward at the tmie we have forgotten, and we are in some
doubt if we seized the precise point of the objection. The
objection, liowever, is not valid, for it assumes that if the
devil were our creator, God would still exist as the intrin-
sically good, and as our final cause. On the absurd hypoth-
esis that the devil creates us, this would not follovv ; for
then the devil would be God, real and necessary being, and
therefore good, consequently, there could not be the contpa-
dictory obligations supposed. The hypothesis was intro-
duced by one of the interlocutors in the discussion, as a
strong way of asserting that obedience is due to tlie com-
mand of our Creator because he is our creator, without refer-
ence to the intrinsic character of the command. The intrin-
sic nature of the command approves or commends it to our
reason and judgment, but does not formally oblige. This is

92 REFUTATION OF ATHEISM.

the doctrine we maintained then, and which we maintain
now, while Dr. "Ward maintained tliat the command binds
only by reason of its intrinsic excellence or sanctity.

AVe asserted that there is no distinction between the idea
of God and the idea of Good, Dr. Ward jnstly objects to
this, and we wei-e wrong in our expression, thoug'h not in
our thought. What we meant to say, and slionld have said
to be consistent with our own doctrine is, that there is no dis-
tinction in re between Good and God, and therefore to ask Is
God good ? is absurd. Dr. Ward, we find in this work, Natui^e
and Grace, asserts very properly the identity of necessary
truths with being ; in his recent criticism on J. Stuart Mill
lie denies it, and says he agrees with Fr. Kleutgen, that they
are founded on being, or God, but as we have remarked in
a foregoing section, what is founded on God must be God
or his creature, and if his creatures, how can these truths be
eternal ?

Dr. Ward's objection has led us to reexamine the doctrine
that moral obligation is founded on the creative act of God,
but we have seen no reason for not continuing to hold it,
though we might modify some of the expressions we formerly
used ; and though we differ from Dr. Ward on a very essen-
tial point, we have a far greater respect for his learning and
ability, as a moral philosopher, than we had before re-read-
ing his work. He seeks to found an independent morality,
not independent of the Divine Being indeed, but independ-
ent of the Divine will. In this we do not wholly differ
from him, and we willingly admit that the Divine will, dis-
tinctively taken, does not make or found the right. The
law expresses, as he contends, the reason of God, his intrinsic
love and goodness, as is asserted in the fact that he is the
final cause of creation, the supreme good, the beatitude of
all rational or moral existences, and the law is imposed by
him as final cause, not as first cause. But this is not the
question now under discussion. Judgments of moral good
may be formed, as Dr. Ward maintains, by intuition of neces-
sary truths founded on God, or identical with his necessary
and eternal being ; but we are not asking how moral judg-
ments are formed, nor what in point of fact our moral judg-
ments are; we are simply discussing the question why the
connnands of God are obligatory, and we maintain that they
oblige us, because they are his commands, and he is our abso-
lute sovereign Lord and Proprietor, for he has made us from
nothing, and we are his and not our own. Hence it follows

OBLIGATION OF WOESHIP. 93

that we liave duties but no rights before God, as asserted by
that noble Christian orator and philosopher, the hnnented
Donoso Cortes, and that what are called the rights of man
are the rights of God, and therefore sacred and inviolable,
which all men, kings and kaisers, peoples and states, aristo-
cracies and democracies, are bound to respect, protect, and
defend, against whoever woukl invade them.

The objection to the doctrine of Dr. Ward's independent
morality is that it is not true, and exacts no surrender of our
w^ills to the Divine wall. It is not true, for Dr. Ward him-
self cannot say that the invasion of the land of Canaan, the
extermination of the people, and taking possession of it as
their own by the children of Israel, can be defended on any
ground except that of the express command of God, who
had the sovereign right to dispose of them as he saw proper.
Abraham offering or his readiness to offer up his son Isaac
was justified because he trusted God, and acted in obedience
to tlie Divine command. Yet to offer a human sacrifice
without such a command, or for any other reason, would
contradict all our moral judgments. If one seeks to do what
the law enjoins, not because God commands it, but' for the
sake of popularity, success in the world, or simply to benefit
himself, here or hereaftei-, he yields no obedience to God.
He acknowledges not the Divine sovereignty. He does not
say to his Maker, "Thy wall, not mine be done;" he does
not pray, "Thy will be done on earth as in heaven;" and,
what is more to the purpose, he recognizes no personal God,
follows God only as impersonal or abstract being, and fails
to own or confess the truth or fact that he is God's creature,
belongs to God as his Lord and Master, who has the absolute
right to command him, as we have shown in showing that
God is man's sole creator.

The essential principle of religion is perfect trust in God,
and obedience to his sovereign will, the unconditional sur-
render of our wills to the will of our Creator. This is only
what the moral law enjoins, for the first law of justice is to
give to every one his due or his own, and we owe to God, as
has been seen, all that we are, have, or can do. This shows
that religion and morality in their principle are one and the
same, and therefore inseparable. There is then no morality
without religion, and no religion without morality. lie who
refuses to keep the commandments of God and to render him
his due, violates the moral law no less than he does the relig-
ious law. Let us hear no more then of independent

94 REFUTATION OF ATHEISM.

morality, which is only an invention to save the ahsohite
surrender of our wills to the will of God, and is inspired by
a reluctance to acknowledge a master.

But this is not all. If the moral law requires our unre-
served obedience to the commands of God, it requires us to
honor, love, trust, and obey him in all things, and therefore
to worship him in the way and manner he prescribes. If then
he is pleased to make us a supernatural revelation of his will
and to promulgate supernatural ly a supernatural law, we are
bound by the moral or natural law to obey it, when promul-
gated and brought to our knowledge, as unreservedly iis we
are to obey the natural law itself. If Christianity be, as it
professes to be, the revelation of the supernatural order, a
supernatural law, no man who knowingly and voluntarily
rejects or refuses to accept it, fulfils the natural law, or can
be accounted a moral man.

We have now, we think completed our task, and redeemed
our promise to refute atheism and to demonstrate theism by
reason. We have proved that being affirms itself to the
soul in ideal intuition, and that being is God, free to act
from intelligence and will, and therefore not an impersonal,
but a personal God, Creator of heaven and earth and all
things visible and invisible — the free upholder of all exist-
ences, and therefore Providence, the final cause of creation,
therefore the perfection, the good, the beatitude of all
rational existences. We have proved his Divine sovereignty
as resting on his creative act, and the obligation of all moral
existences to obey his law, and to honor and worship his
Divine Majesty as he himself prescribes. We can go no
further, by the light of reason, but this is far enough for
Our argument.

XV. — TRADITION.

We have now proved, or at least indicated the process of
proving, with all the certainty we have that we think or
exist, the existence of God, that he is real and necessary
being, being in its plenitude, or as say the theologians, ens
jperfectissimnim^ self -existent and self-sufficing, independent,
universal, immutable, eternal, without beginning or end,
supracosmic, supernatural, free, voluntary creator of heaven
and earth and all things visible and invisible : creating them
from nothing, without any extrinsic or intrinsic necessity,
by the free act of his will and the sole word of his power ;

TRADITION. 95

the principle, medium, and end of all existences, the
absolute Sovereis^n Proprietor, and Lord of all creatures,
the Upholder and moral Governor of the univ^erso, in wlioin
and for whom are all things, and whom all I'ational exist-
ences are bound to worsliip as iheir sovereign Lord, and in
returning to whom by the telcological law, thej attain to
their perfection, fulhl the purpose for which thej exist,
enter into possession of their supreme good, their supreme
beatitude in God, wlio is the good, or beatitude itself. We
have in this ascertained the ground of moral obligation, and
the principle of all religion, morality, and politics. We
liave then proved our thesis, refuted atheism under all its
forms ani disguises, and positively demonstrated Christian
theism.

]3ut, though we hold the existence of God may be proved
with certainty by the process we have followed or indicated,
we are far from pretending or believing that it is by that
process that mankind, as a matter of fact, have attained to
their belief in God or knowledge of the Divine Being.
We do not say that man could not, but we hold that lie did
not, attain to this science and belief without the direct and
immediate supernatural instructions of his Maker. The race
in all ages has held the belief from tradition, and philosophy
has been called in only to verify or prove the traditionary
teaching. Men believe before they doubt or think of proving.
We doubt if, as a fact, any one ever was led to the truth by
reasoning. The truth is grasped intuitively or immediately
by the mind, and the reasoning comes afterwards to verify
it, or to prove that it is truth. The reasoning does not origi-
nate the belief, but comes to defend or to justify it. Ilen^e
it is that no man is ever converted to a doctrine he absolutely
rejects, by simple logic, however unanswerable and conclusive
it may be.

Supposing the process we have indicated is a complete
demonstration of the existence of God as creator and moral
Goveinorof the universe, few men are capable of following
and understanding it, even among those who have made the
study of philosophy and theology the business of their lives.
Tiie greatest philosophers among the Gentiles missed it, and
the scientists of our own day also miss it, and fail to recog-
nize the fact of creation and admit no supramundane God.
Even eminent theologians, as we have seen, who no more
doubt tlie existence of God than they do their own, prove
themselves utterly unable to demonstrate or prove that God

96 REFUTATION OF ATHEISM.

is. Dr. JSTewman, for instance, whose Christian faith is not
to be doubted, confesses his inabihty to prove the existence
of (Jod from reason, and in liis Essay on the Development
of Christian Doctrme^ if he does not sap the foundation of
belief in revelation, he destroys its value, by subjectino; it
to the variations and imperfections of the human understand-
ing. Ilis Essay in Aid of a Grammar of Assent is an
attempt to prove the relativity of all science or knowledge,
that in practice we assent to the probable without ever
demanding or attaining to the certain, the apodictic, and
is hardly less incompatible with the existence of God than
tlie cosmic pliilosophy of tlie school of Herbert Spencer,
from which it in principle does not, as far as we can see,
essentially differ.

If such men as Plato, Aristotle, Plotinus, Proclus. Her-
bert Spencer, Auguste Comte, Emil Littre, and John Henry
I^ewman are unequal to the process, how can we suppose
that the doctrine that God is, originated in that or any pro-
cess of reasoning? Peason in the elite of the race may
prove that God is, but how can reason, wanting the word,
originate and establish it in tlie minds of the ignorant,
uncultivated, rude, and rustic multitude ? And yet it is pre-
cisely this multitude, ignorant and incapable of philosophy,
who hold it with the greatest firmness and tenacity, and only
philosophers, and such as are formed by them, ever doubt it.
There is, no doubt, a true and useful philosophy, if one
could only find it, but philosophers in all ages have been
far more successful in obscuring the truth and causing doubt,
than in enlightening the mind and correcting errors. Plato
was little else than a sophist ridiculing and refuting sophists ;
and in all ages we find so-called philosophers originating and
defending the grossest and absurdest errors that have ever
obtained, and we find them true and just only when they
accord with tradition.

Intuition, as we have shown, furnishes the principle of
the demonstration or proof of the existence of God, with
absolute certainty ; but ideal intuition, which gives the
principle of cognition, is not itself cognition, and though
implicitly contained in every thought as its condition, it
becomes explicit or express only as sensibly re-presented in
language, and the long and tedious analytical process per-
formed by the refiective reason. To get at the ideal for-
mula, which expresses the matter of intuition, we have had
to use reflection, and both analytical and synthetic reason-

TRADITION. 97

ing. The formula is obtained explicitly only by analyzing
thonglit, the object in thought, and the ideal element of the
object, and synthetizing the results of the several analyses.
It is only by this long and difficult process that one is able
to assert as the intuitive synthesis, Ens creai existentias, or
the essential principles of theistic philosophy. It is so
because ideal intuition, as distinguished from empirical intu-
ition, is not open vision of the object presented, is not the
soul's cognition or judgment, but the objective or divine
judgment affirmed to the soul implicitl_y, that is, indistinctly
in every tliought or empirical judgment, and must be dis-
tinguished fjoni the empirical by the reflective or analytical
activity of the soul, or, in the language of St. Thomas,
abstracted or disengaged by the active intellect, intellectus
agens, from the phantasmata and intelligible species in which
it is given, before it can be explicitly apprehended by the
soul, and be distinct cognition, or a human judgment, the
complete verhura mentis.

"When a false philosophy has led to the doubt or denial of
God, this recurrence to ideal intuition is necessary to remove
the douljt, and to make our philosophical doctrines accord
with the principles of the real and the knowable ; but it is
evident to the veriest tyro that nbt even the philosopher,
however he may contirm his judgment by the intuition,
takes his idea that God is, immediately and directly from
it ; for this would imply that we have direct and immediate
empirical intuition of God, which not even Plato pretended,
for he held the Divine Idea is cognizable only by the mime-
sis., the image, or copy of itself, impressed on matter, as the
seal on wax, whence his doctrine and that of the Scholastics,
of knowledge ^er ideam, per similitudinem, per formam.,
ov per sjjeciem.

We cannot take the ideal directly from the intuition,
because we are not pure spirit, but in this life spirit united
to body ; yet we have the idea in our minds before we can
deny it, or think of seeking to demonstrate it. Hence it
must be acknowledged, that though reason is competent to
prove the existence of God with certainty when denied or
doubted, as we think we have shown, it did not, and per-
haps could not, have originated the Idea, but has taken it
from tradition, and it must have been actually taught the
first man by his Maker himself.

The historical fact is that man has never been abandoned
by his Maker to the light and force of nature alone, or left

yo REFUTATION OF ATHEISM.

witliont any siipernntural instruction, or assistance, any more
than he lias been left without language. The doctrine of St.
Thomas is historically true, that there never has been but
one revelation from God to man, and that one revelation was
made in substance to our first parents, before their expulsion
from the garden of Eden. This revelation is what we call
tradition, and has been handed down from father to son to
us. It has come down to us in two lines: in its purity and
integrity from Adam through the Patriarchs to the Syna-
gogue, and through the Sjmagogue to the Christian Church
whence we hold it; in a corrupt, broken, and often a tra-
vestied form through Gentilism, or Heathenism. The great
mistake of our times is in neglecting to study it in the
orthodox line, and in studying it only in the heterodox or
Gentile line of transmission, all of which we hope to prove
in a succeeding work, if our life and health are spared to
complete it, on revelation in opposition to prevailing ration-
alism.

The reader will bear in mind that we have not appealed
to tradition as authority or to supply the defect of demon-
stration ; but only to explain the origin and universality
of theism, especially with the great bulk of mankind, who
could never prove it by a logical process for themselves,
nor understand such process when made by others. Hence
we escape the error of the Traditionalists censured by the
Holy See.

Tlie error of the Traditionalists is not in asserting that
men learn the existence of God from tradition or from the
teaching of others, which is a fact verifiable from what we
see taking place every day before our eyes ; but in denying
that the existence of God and the first principles of morals
or necessary truth, what we call the ideal judgment, are cog-
nizable or provable by natural reason, and in making them
matters of faith, not of science, as do Dr. Thomas Keid, Sir
William Hamilton, Dean Mansel, Viscount de Bonald, Bon-
netty, Immanuel Kant, and others. This is inadmissible,
because it builds science on faith, deprives us of all rational
motives for faith, and leaves faith- itself nothing to stand on.
Faith, in the last analysis, rests on the veracity of God, and
its formula is, Deus est Verax, but if we know not. as the
preamble to faith, that God is, and that it is impossible for
him to deceive or to be deceived, how can we assert his
veracity or confide in his word? Knowing already that God
is and is infinitely true, we cannot doubt his word, when we

TRADITION. 99

are certain that we have it. Tliis connects faith with reason,
and makes faith, objectively at least, as certain as science,
as St. Thomas asserts. J^

God mnst have infused the knowledi>-e of himself into the q./)
soul ofTlie first man, when he made him ; for all the knowl- ^fTf-
edge or science of the first man must have been infused
knowledge or science, since the fact of creation upsets the
Darwinian theoiy of development, as well as the Spencerian
theory of evolution, and Adam must have been created a Ap
man in the prime of his manhood, and not, as it were, a
new-born infant. What was infused science in him,
becomes tradition in his posterity, but a tradition of science,
not of faith or belief only. The tradition, if preserv'ed in i '
its purity and integrity, embodies the ideal intuition, or'^''^^
ideal judgment common to all men, and implicit in every
thought, in language, the sensible sign of the ideal or intel-
ligible, and which represents it to the active intellect that
expresses it, renders it explicit, and therefore actual cogni-
tion.

It follows from this that the ideal judgment when re-pre-
sented by tradition through the medium of language, its
sensible representative, is even in the simple, the rustic, the
untutored in logic and philosophy, who are incapable of
proving it by a logical process or even of understanding
such a process, really matter of science, not of simple belief
or confidence in tradition. The tradition enables them to
convert, so to speak, the intuition into cognition, so that
they know as really and truly that God is, and is the cre-
ator, upholder, and moral Governor of man and the uni-
verse, as does the profoundest theologian or philosopher.
Hence wherever the primitive tradition is preserved in any
degree, there is, if not complete knowledge of God, at least
an imperfect knowledge that God is, and this knowledge,
however feeble and indistinct, faint or evanescent, serves as
the />oz>i^ d\ippui or basis of the operations i>f the Christian
missionary among savage and barljarous tribes for their con-
version.

The tradition is not the basis of science, but is in the
supersensible a necessary condition of science, and hence
the value and necessity of instruction or education. The
ideal judgment is, as ideal, not our judgment, but objective,
Divine, intuitively presented to the soul as the condition
and model of our own. We can form no judgment without
it, and every judgment formed must 'copy or be modelled

.f^72285 A

100 REFUTATION OF ATHEISM.

after it. But, as we have shown, we cannot take tlie ideal
directly from the intuition, but must take it primarily from
tradition or as re-presented tlirough the senses in language,
which is really what is meant by education, or instruction.
But all instruction, all education, reproduces, as far as it
goes, tradition, or depends on it.

As language is the sensible representation of the idea, and
the medium of tradition, the importance of St. Paul's
injunction to St. Timothy, to " hold fast the form of sound
■words," and of maintaining tradition in its purity and
integrity is apparent to the did lest mind. The corruption
of either involves the corruption, mutilation, or travesty of
the idea, and leads to heathenism, false theism, pantheism,
atheism, demonism, as the histor}- of the great Gentile
apostasy from the patriarchal or primitive religion of man-
kind amply proves. As tradition of the truths or first prin-
ciples of science, which are ideal not empirical, had its
orioin in revelation or the immediate instruction of Adam
by ids Maker, we cannot fail to perceive the fatal error of
those who seek to divorce philosophy from revelation, and,
like Descartes, to errect it into an independent science.
Revelation is not the basis of philosophy, but no philosophy
of any value can be constructed without it.